Unprecedented
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: Unprecedented; adjective: never done or known before. In which Peter Parker does many things a spider can, but a human body can't. Featuring Kamala Khan, because I would kill to have her in the mcu.
1. Chapter 1

Kamala was so dead.

She'd just vicariously KO'd an Avenger.

The crazy-terrigen-mist-gun-guys had been chasing _her,_ and she'd been leading them back towards the Avengers, because there were so many of them and Iron Man had told her to. The fight had barely started when Spider-man just... _dropped_. He'd gone ragdoll-limp in midair, and Kamala had stretched out an arm to catch him.

She was holding a _completely unconscious_ (part-time) A-lister. And she wasn't quite sure what to do about that. There were still very hydra-ish robots running around, as well as the mist-gun/normal gun guys. On top of that, she had to worry about his injuries from the previous fight- he was doing rather a lot of bleeding.

Quinjet. The Avengers had a plane.

"Iron Man-" Kamala tried to whisper into her earpiece. "I'm going to take Spider-man to your weird Avengers plane and maybe come back."

"Okay," Iron Man said in her ear. "Update me if he wakes up before the fight is over."

Kamala took off on stretching legs, cradling Spider-man in her hands. The quinjet was a few blocks away, and quick to reach, even if she did maybe step on someone's roof at one point.

Spider-man was oddly hot in her hands. She knew he ran hot, slightly, because she'd looked it up and everyone who had direct contact with him said he was warm, but this was going beyond that. He was worryingly warm, damp with sweat and blood.

This was not a good first meeting.

When Kamala got back to the quinjet, she disembiggened back to normal size, and carried Spider-man in bridal style. She laid him out across a few seats and intently did not panic. She knew he wasn't inhuman, probably, or he'd be cocooning. He was breathing fast and shallow.

It probably wasn't safe to leave him. She didn't know what the mist would do to a spider-person. Nobody did.

God, this would be a lot easier if she could see his face. The mask hid his expression, but if she was keeping her identity a secret, he should have that right, too.

Just before the _panic_ threshold for unconsciousness, Spider-man woke up. He pushed himself up on his elbows did a hissing inwards gasp, the prelude to a scream.

"Shhh!" Kamala hissed. "Don't attract attention."

Spider-man sat up clamped a hand over his mouth, which either meant he was listening or he was about to throw up.

"Ms. Marvel? What the hell happened?" He asked, and _wow_ was that not the voice Kamala'd expected. She'd never heard him talk before, she realised. He sounded...young. And seriously freaked out.

"You reacted badly to the terrigen mist," She said. "You blacked out. And, um, you're probably rapidly mutating right now, so…"

"Oh," Spider-man said. "Is… is that bad? Like...Weird bad, compared to other people who got hit with the mist?"

He was speaking uncharacteristically slowly. Like the situation made no sense. Which it didn't, so go him.

Mist swirled past the windows.

"Uh, maybe?" Kamala said. "Does it feel bad? I got superpowers when I got hit, but you already have those. I don't know what it'll do."

"I feel basically fine," Spider-man said. " _Last_ time I did a lot of rapid mutation, It really messed me up. I think this is different."

"We should probably wait it out, though. In case anything happens." Kamala glanced around the interior of the quinjet. "Is there anything I could, uh-"

She was cut off. Spider-man pressed a finger to what had to have been an earpeice. In the silence of the quinjet, she could just make out the buzz of a voice.

"I'm awake, yeah, but-" Spider-man was cut off by the tinny buzz again. "No, no, bench _me_ if you have to, but Ms. Marvel- I don't need a babysitter. I'm literally _fine_."

Kamala, personally, would argue that he was very much not fine.

"But Mister _Stark_ -" he was almost pleading, now.

"Ms. Marvel, you're excused from this particular fight." Tony clicked on in Kamala's ear, making her jump. "You're in charge of Spider-man. Just keep him in one place and make sure he doesn't luck!"

There was a click.

"I'm in charge?" Kamala asked the world at large. "Why am I in charge?"

"The Avengers are used to fighting without you," Spider-man said. "So they can afford to ditch you with me. Want to go back anyway?"

"You'll probably react to the mist again." Kamala pointed out.

"But I might _not_." Spider-man protested. "It's just as likely that I'll be fine. I barely got to do anything."

"Spider-man, _no_ ," Kamala said, trying to sound authoritative. "We don't know what could happen from here. You're physiologically unique. The mist could do _anything_ to you."

"Spider-man _yes_ , because people could _die_." Spider-man hauled himself unsteadily back to his feet. He was only a few inches taller than Kamala, which was _very_ weird. "I'm not going to stop just because of… some weird fog. There are particulate masks in one of the cabinets."

He looked around for the right place, and pressed a hidden button on the quinjet wall, and a panel popped open.

"You're a people!" Kamala blurted. " _You_ could die!"

"Eloquent." Spider-man carefully rolled the bottom half of his mask up, velcroed the particulate mask with trembling hands, and pulled his mask back down. "There. Safe. Wanna go kick ass with me?"

"You are not going to kick _any more ass_ today," Kamala said. "Tony Stark has banned you from ass-kicking. And you might be actually dying, or something?"  
It finally hit that this was actual Spider-Man. Kamala was trying to _command_ actual Spider-man. It made sense that he wouldn't be listening. He'd been around for at least a year longer than she had.

"I don't have _time_ to worry about every time I might die." Spider-man said. Kamala reached out, hesitated. She wasn't sure about physical contact, as stupid as it sounded. "I do a lot of _might die_ -ing. It's in the job description."

He moved to open the door and Kamala-

Panicked. She panicked and embiggened and pinned actual Spider-man under her hand. Her palm arced over him, two fingers pinning his shoulders, she gritted her teeth. This was Iron Man's opinion vs Spider-Man's and-

" _Rude_." Spider-man shifted under her palm, then kicked up with both feet. Kamala felt the jolt in her bones.

She'd seen him bench-press a family sedan. She was pretty lucky he hadn't broken anything.

Spider-man opened the doors via another hidden panel. They'd missed most of the fun; the Avengers had half of an army in handcuffs by now.

Standing just outside in all his red, gold, and glowing glory, was Iron Man.

He crossed his alloy-clad arms.

"And what were you trying to do, Spidey?" He said, in a distinctly disappointed-dadish voice.

 _Iron Man_ had a _dad voice_.

 _Iron Man_.

was going to _love_ this.

"Nothing?" Spider-man said, like he wasn't clearly wearing a mask under his mask and swaying where he stood.

"Look." Tony Stark's faceplate slid back into his helmet in one smooth movement. His expression was grave. "Spider-man. Please take this seriously."

"I _was_ -" Spider-man began.

"I have no idea what's happening to you," Tony said. "But it could kill you."

Kamala realised she was the resident expert on terrigen mist. She was standing with Spider-man and Iron Man and new something more than they did.

She raised her hand.

"Well, it probably won't," She said. "I mean, usually it doesn't make people die? But accounting for Spider-man's, uh, unique physiology, we should maybe wait a couple days to see what happens."

"It's already doing… something. Something that's screwing with Spider-man's metabolism and sinking glucose like nothing on earth," Iron Man, good god, actual _Iron Man_ , said. "I'm just not sure what."


	2. Chapter 2

Peter's day was crappy enough already, without running into Falcon's evil twin.

After nightfall, New York was incandescent. Except above the streetlights. Up on the rooftops, in places, it was pitch black.

He technically wasn't meant to be back to work yet. He was being 'monitored'. But nobody had swooped in and grounded him or anything, so they'd probably accepted he was fine.

Because he _was_ fine. He didn't need babysitting.

Peter's spider-sense- he _had_ to think of a better name- was trilling. A low, constant, anxiety-inducing buzz in response to apparently nothing. It was one of those things that was sometimes Too Much, the _constant_ alarming that still happened some days. It'd been awful at first. Like the whole world was screaming at once.

He'd outgrown that. Mostly. It only really did the constant-background-noise thing when he was ill or injured, or being followed.

He really hoped he wasn't being followed.

He swung upwards and landed on the side of a building, then crawled up the concrete to try and get a better look around. There was nobody on the ground, or the nearby rooftops, not even the normal criminal activity. He'd stumbled upon a rare moment of _peace_.

The buzzing grew stronger.

Spider-man had made the same mistake as most of his enemies did. He forgot to look up.

The shape above him was amazingly silent. He should have been able to hear _something_ at least, but he wasn't aware of it until he was caught in its glare.

Positioned above him, swooping round in an arc with their eyes fixed on him, was...something. Something with a wingspan the size of a hang-glider and eyes that blazed like spotlights.

"Hi." Peter waved to spooky wing dude, who looked like Ultron crossed with Mothman; his face was all steel. "'Sup?"

The guy had engines- turbines or propellers maybe, because you couldn't fly with just glowing bluish disks- embedded in his wings. Or maybe _her_ wings, Peter didn't know. They were wearing something of an exoskeleton, metal bars along their legs and arms.

They didn't answer, just hovered closer, massive wings angled to face the ground. Peter's Spider-sense was screeching like a fire alarm, and rightfully- he had to scramble upwards and on to the roof to escape a punch that cracked the concrete.

Peter was very much a defensive fighter.

He'd just been given permission to hit back.

Bird Guy swooped up above him in one movement of the massive wings, the draft kicking up clouds of dust.

" _Dude,_ " Peter said, because the wings were completely, fascinatingly different from Falcon's. "How do those _work_? They look super heavy, but obviously you've got that counteracted- is it the engines, 'cause- _woah!_ "

The wings moved _wrongly_ , like living things, to arc through the air and fling a wave of blades. Peter _barely_ managed to dodge.

"I just _asked a question_." He aimed a webline at Bird Guy, and caught the middle of one wing. "There's no need to be like that. What kind of bird are you, meant to be anyway? Falcon's already taken, and Hawks are like, half-taken because of hawkeye. And I can't think of any birds that are brownish-greenish."

The turbines on that side whirred to life, countering, and it became a battle of strengths- Peter's attachment to the rooftop, against the power of the engines.

"Sparrow?" Peter suggested, as the concrete paneling buckled, and came up in chunks with the soles of his feet. "Or maybe a parrot? Some parrots are green."  
Bird guy was apparently much stronger than Peter was heavy, because they both shot upwards the second the roof gave out. Peter aimed for the free wing and caught it.

"I know!" He said, yanking inwards and locking his shoulders to get the wings at a certain angle. "You're a _kiwi!_ Kiwis fit your colour scheme _perfectly_."

Bird-guy dropped like a penny thrown off the empire state building. Peter was yanked down by the weight of the massive wings; his collarbone was very sharply acquainted with the corner of a building. There was an almost _violent_ click as it broke. He stuck there, and the webs snapped like fishing line.

Peter scrambled up on to the rooftop as Bird Guy flew back up.

"I am the _vulture._ " Bird guy's voice was heavily altered by the mask. Or maybe he _was_ the mask. He could be some kind of android, or something.

Peter opened his mouth to comment, and the Vulture screeched.

It was not a sound a human could make.

The scream was mechanical, layered and grating and horribly _loud._ After the first millisecond, the sound was a stabbing pain in Peter's ears, then suddenly almost inaudible, vibrating in the air like the shockwaves from a bass drum.

Distantly, Peter heard his own muffled voice saying _oh shit_.

The Vulture swept in fists first, and Peter simply sidestepped, his ears ringing.

"I guess that's why you're not a songbird." Peter could barely hear himself speak; chances were the kiwi had blown out his eardrums, which was just unnecessary and _rude_.

The Vulture landed on the neighbouring apartment block, and Peter took a chance. He ran, lept, and-

Was stabbed.

The Vulture had raised a knee to his chest and driven foot-mounted _knives_ into Peter's body. One between his ribs, one _in_ a rib, and one just beneath his belly button, sharpened spikes that went right through his suit and skin.

Why hadn't he noticed those _before_?

The Vulture pushed him away, almost _casually_ , holding him just far enough out that Peter's flailing arms couldn't reach him. Peter webbed across his eyes, struggling not to scream- he could feel the Vulture's talon in his _lung_ , god had he fucked up. It was getting difficult to breathe.

The Vulture scraped the webbing away, eyes blazing bright. The apertures of Peter's mask couldn't compensate enough.

"Y'know," he wheezed. "You're not really accurate to vultures. They're scavengers. They don't stab people. Real vultures would be super insulted by how you're portraying them."

It wasn't like being stabbed was anything _special_. This time had just used his momentum against him.

Peter put his hands on the side of the Vulture's foot, and contorted into a backbend, the back of his head level with his thighs and his torso pulled just far enough off the talons for him to drop down and messily flop away. He clung upside-down to the wall, one hand in void above a balcony.

 _Okay_ , he thought. _Vulture_. _Fight the vulture. Gosh, that's a lot of blood_.

Re-orienting himself was agonising, but he took a step back up the wall anyway and grabbed for the Vulture's leg, the talons an inch from his face.

The Vulture screeched again, the sound ringing through the air.

"What's your suit made of? Can I see?" Peter asked, grabbing for the leg of his exoskeleton, tearing at the metal. It bucked outwards and came other, free set of talons clamped down on Peter's shoulder, the bottom talon sliding in at an angle and forcing his cracked collarbone in half.

His vision went pure white.

The turbines whirred, and Peter barely had the time to realise why that was bad before they were in the air.

He didn't speak, he _couldn't,-_ if he opened his mouth he'd start screaming. His entire body weight was hanging from three barbed blades, pulling every time the Vulture moved. He couldn't move the shoulder he was being suspended by, so he couldn't use that arm to get out.

He pawed at the Vulture's other leg, grasping for the damaged exoskeleton. The Vulture kicked back, missing Peter's wrist but sending him swinging, the movement on the talons widening the wounds around them.

Blood was soaking through his costume, both from the wounds he was hanging by and those in his abdomen. It seemed like a miracle when he swung up and hooked his arm around the Vulture's knee, taking a tiny, blissful amount of weight off his shoulder.

They were moving fast, horribly fast. Peter was vaguely concerned about his punctured lung- his healing factor would probably take care of it before it could collapse, but it _hurt_ like hell and he wasn't sure how bad it would have time to get.

Turning his head meant moving his neck which meant jostling his shoulder, but he really, really had to get his bearings somehow.

It slowly occurred to Peter that he was being kidnapped.

He wasn't sure what to do; even if he got free he'd just be dropped. And he'd seen what happened to men who fell from the sky.

He still had full use of his legs, so if he could stop being a baby long enough to use his shoulder as some kind of pivot-

Peter gritted his teeth, and swung his legs up. He got one foot on the Vulture's massive wing, stuck, and kicked at the metal with the other. Brick walls would be jealous. The wing was _solid_.

Spots danced in front of Peter's eyes as the metal talon rubbed against the ends of his clavicle. He made another few attempts on the wing, denting then puncturing it. The hole went through layers on layers of metal, but seemed to do pretty much nothing.

He dropped again and regretted it, trying to keep ahold of the Vulture's leg. Blood had pooled on his abdomen while he'd been bent and kicking; it ran down his legs and dripped off into the wind.

God had he fucked up. He'd been totally wrong on the _Falcon's Evil Twin_ thing; Vulture was like Falcon crossed with a tank. A very pointy, potentially murderous tank. He could have been hitting so much _harder._ He'd gone completely tactically wrong, and now he was dangling from the claws of New York's newest costumed crazy, in so much pain he might throw up.

He could fix this, though. When they landed. The Vulture would have to let him go for a second, or loosen his grip. The wings wouldn't be much use on the ground, so if he moved fast enough he could get bird-brain webbed up and call for cleanup.  
Unless the Vulture tried to drug him. Which might happen, because he was being...taken somewhere. And usually you drugged the people you kidnapped.

But his physiology would help him out there. He'd burn through anything at double rate at least.

He could handle it.

Beneath them, city became suburbs, suburbs blurred into forest. They flew higher, high enough that the air was colder, and they met the clammy fog of the lowest-hanging clouds.

So Peter couldn't see where they were going.

He could walk back, he reasoned. Once he'd healed up a bit. It would take him a long time, but his suit didn't have built-in comms and he didn't have any other options. He'd just pick a direction and probably find civilization eventually.

Maybe the Vulture had a nest, like an actual bird. Or a lair. Vultures might have lairs, Peter wasn't an ornithologist. Bird-themed super-people seemed to avoid that sort of thing. He'd asked Hawkeye and Falcon about it and gotten punched both times.

They landed, after a terrifying descent, on a cabin roof. Slate tiles, cool through the suit. The Vulture tore his talons out of Peter's shoulder, the barbs ripping cloth and flesh. Somewhere in the back of his mind Peter remembered what raptors used their claws for. He jumped back to his feet. The Vulture's wings were unwieldy out of the air, they _had_ to be.

The Vulture collapsed them, the entire massive wingspan fitting into roughly the area of a backpack.

But Peter was already back on his feet and bleeding less. He was ready.

It was one simple move to get the Vulture pinned. Peter straddled the Vulture's legs and webbed his arms down at the wrists. The glowing- no, _blinding,_ made to cut out night vision- eyes stared straight upwards.

The Vulture jerked against the webbing, to no effect. All his power was in his suit.

"Why did you bring me out here?" Peter asked. His hearing was slowly coming back."What do you _want_? If you needed someone to come on your serene woodland retreat with you, you could have tried asking? Or craigslist?"

"I want the Avengers." Four little words, that made Peter genuinely want to curbstomp the guy.

"You're using me as _bait_?" He hissed. He wasn't great at sounding threatening, but the way the Vulture flinched away, he seemed to have accomplished it. "I'm your _hostage_?"

Bait meant an ambush, which meant there were _more_ people, who he'd be on his own against, because the Avengers probably wouldn't come for him. The whole thing was ridiculous, and _stupid_. Why would you _kidnap_ Spider-man? What kind of idiot _did_ that?

He'd known that the Avengers treated him like a child, but not...not this far.

He'd just have to get out of this on his own.

Peter dug his fingers into the hip joint of the exoskeleton, ripped outwards. If he could have one less adversary-

Vulture's wings unfurled, the shifting robotics lifting them both off the roof. The edges sliced through the webbing, effortlessly sharp. Peter had to bite back a cry of frustration. Being out in the middle of nowhere was _pointless_. There was so much that needed doing elsewhere.

He got a hand in the glowing ring-not a turbine after all-, and tore at it. He came away with a handful of strange metal. Panels of exoskeleton clung to the insides of his thighs as the Vulture _ripped_ himself away and hauled himself back into a standing position. Peter aimed to web his feet to the roof, so he could finish his _job_ \- but the Vulture rocketed up into the air again. For someone wearing enough metal to build a full-sized car, he moved crazy fast.

Peter aimed a webline upwards and regretted it. He couldn't anchor the Vulture.

The Vulture hauled him off the roof, and yanked him up into his claws by the webbing.

And kept going. Upwards, Upwards and upwards. The cabin became a square that Peter could have blocked out with his palm.

Then the glowing engines died down and they began the fall to earth.

They were falling from a height that killed people.

They were falling from a height that had almost killed _War Machine_.

Peter wasn't War Machine, far from it. His costume was designed for glancing blows from knives at absolute _best,_ and he was going to _die._

Tepid air surged past as they fell.

His spider-sense became something horrific, almost unbearable, drowning out all functional thought. There was nothing but the approaching ground.

Tony had trackers on him, Peter knew- they'd find his body, at least, May'd get _closure_ -

Suddenly, they were jerked into the sky, the Vulture's talons ripping upwards just enough to hurt. They were slowed in their plummet downwards, but it didn't matter; Peter's heart was already racing. The edges of anxiety clawed at him, the prelude to a panic attack hammering in his chest. They were still falling fast, far too fast to be safe-

At the last second, Vulture positioned his free foot and let go of Peter's shoulder.

His weight and the force of the fall drove his talons in, until only a fraction of their length was exposed. The sole of his boot pressed into Peter's stomach.

Peter couldn't help it. He shrieked his throat raw in the seconds it took for the parachute to drift down around them. He clawed like a mad thing at the Vulture's legs, taking chunks out of the exoskeleton, the flight suit underneath, maybe even the skin. Vulture returned the gesture, ripping at all exposed skin with his other set of talons, digging in then ripping up.

Peter tucked his legs in close, the talons digging in new places as his body shifted around them, and kicked upwards as hard as he could.

The talons ripped out of his body. The Vulture hit the ground so hard he almost rolled backwards.

Peter sprung to his feet and broke into a lurching sprint, crashing through the bush. He glanced back to see the Vulture standing sentinel, eyes glowing like dull stars. As he got farther away, the eyes themselves faded, replaced by the massive glowing circles of the turbines in his wings.

Eventually, he could slow down. He could accept that he wasn't being followed. He had to. He couldn't _breathe_.

He couldn't see the building. There was nothing in any direction but dark, dark trees.

He crawled up the rough trunk of a sycamore and poked his head above the treetops. He could see, luminescent on the horizon, the repeating slanted squares of the Avengers' compound windows.

God, he was lucky.


	3. Chapter 3

Tony had never been more grateful for a lab with a view.

Standing at the edge of the compound lawn was a _figure_ , moving slowly along the treeline like they were trying not to be seen. They would have had to jump the perimeter fence _and_ know where the compound was, but they'd been seen coming, whoever they may be.

He got FRIDAY to pull up a feed from the nearest camera, and didn't even have to zoom in.

Bright red and blue; a recognisable costume. Designed to stand out, a visual shout of _here I am, notice me_.

Tony wasn't the type to panic. When he sprinted out across the dewy grass in his socks he did it in a completely rational, measured way.

He had to stop for a minute because he seemed to have slipped into a horror movie.

Spider-man was standing at the treeline, hunched over with his arms around his body, one hand making a shaky attempt at direct pressure. The other was cupped over a spot on his chest, like it hurt too much to really touch.

He looked like something had tried to _shred_ him.

The suit was held together by congealing blood and scraps of lining. Whatever had done this had a very distinctive pattern of attack. The wounds came in threes, y-shaped divots half-healed in his skin.

Parker took a shuffling step forward, stumbled. He had literally superhuman balance; they could be looking at either a brain injury or drugging.

"I met the Vulture," He said, his voice strained, like he wasn't breathing right. "He's … not nice."

"That sounds like an understatement," Tony said.

He had seen Peter take the worst beatings of his life so far and this blew them all out of the water.

Because of the blood.

"Sorry." Peter mumbled. "I… I screwed up. A lot. He- a guy in a bird suit shouldn't be able to kick my ass like this."

They'd done _tests_. His blood clotted faster than average and his wounds healed almost too fast to hemorrhage from. He didn't bleed that much, and anyone he _made_ bleed that much wouldn't get the chance to hurt him so badly.

Tony grabbed Peter's wrists and gently moved his hands away. Straight away, he could hear the telltale hiss-splutter of a sucking wound, quiet but clear. Bubbles of blood frothed from the gash in Peter's chest. It was mirrored by one in his upper abdomen, torn and wet like whatever weapon used had gone in sideways then been ripped out. The wound was horribly deep; Tony could see moist, mangled anatomy that should never meet air.

 _Shit_.

"He normally _wouldn't_ ," Tony said, his heart pounding. "I'll bet it's something from the terrigen mist."

Tony could have been _watching_. The suit had been crammed with tech for _exactly_ this sort of thing. He let go of Peter's wrists.

"He wanted you guys." Peter said, his voice soft, wheezing. "The Vulture. I was… y'know."

Being held hostage.

Which wouldn't have happened if someone had so much as glanced at the sensors. Which they really should have, since Peter wasn't even supposed to be back in the suit yet. He was supposed to be going about his civilian life and reporting anything that went wrong.

It had been really, really, stupid to assume that he would have actually done that.

"That's not your fault," Tony said. "You need to come inside."

"'S kinda my fault." Peter tugged his mask off, inhaled hard. "Ugh. My head hurts. Sorry if he followed. I need to- not run next time. I need a first aid kit."

Tony _hated_ that. With the mask, Peter came off as cocky, confident and most importantly, unreadable. Without it, he came off as a _kid_. A teary-eyed, exhausted kid, trying and failing to keep the pain off his face.

"You need actual medical attention," Tony insisted. " _Now_."

Peter looked heartbreakingly horrified by the prospect of it. His rapid breathing started to sound a little like sobbing.

"No, Mr. Stark, _no,_ I- I can fix this…" He trailed off halfway through a sentence, made one last pathetic protest before giving in. "I'll heal, anyway."

He had to awkwardly tug his mask back on with one hand. He barely moved the other.

The walk through to medical was an awful experience. Mostly because Peter looked like he was genuinely about to collapse, partially because it was at least a little bit Tony's fault.

He'd designed the damn costume; he'd dressed Spider-man for agility above all else. It was stupidly reckless to try and take down a villain you didn't understand with a body that could be doing _anything,_ but if he'd had armour…

They were met the second they stepped through the door, by one of the agents-with-medical-qualifications. They never came off as welcoming as real doctors; everyone in medical seemed to judge you for being there. Really, they had to; when agents or Avengers were injured, there was usually information to gain.

"Spider-man," She told her earpiece, then turned to Tony. There was a barely-perceptible twitch of disgust before her face went supportively blank. "We'll need clearance on any information you have on his biology."

It was a simple thing to wire them through but they didn't _know_ _enough._ Peter metabolised drugs differently but they weren't sure how or why, and his healing factor seemed to be getting faster over time. He was something of a wildcard.

" _Don't_ take my mask," Peter insisted, as he was spirited away out of the empty waiting area.

Tony shouldn't really have been panicking so much, but Peter had a way of making everything seem like a disaster. He was never melodramatic, but he inspired overreactions.

Chances were, they'd just stitch the worst back together and wait. Given fluids and time, Peter could heal from pretty much anything.

FRIDAY'd been running scans, as usual. After one hidden injury too many, Tony had gotten her to report what his teammates didn't.

He pulled up a scan of Peter's body, holographic blue. Injuries were outlined in white.

There was a lot of white.

Sometimes Tony wondered if the kid was physically incapable of following an order. He wouldn't have to be so good at winging everything if he'd plan _one second_ of his life. It got in the way of his potential, in battle- he was blindly reactionary. He coasted through fights like smart kids coasted through school.

And it kept getting him hurt.

Someday he was going to meet someone that fraction of a second faster than him, and he'd be in trouble. Peter Parker didn't really know how to fight. He only knew how to hit back.

Waking Bruce at two-ish wasn't the best idea, but he'd seen more wounds than Tony had. They'd be able to work out what Spidey'd been fighting.

They ended up in the nearest common area to medical, drinking underwhelming coffee and slowly exploring the full scope of Peter's injuries. Tony kept the scan from when he'd entered the building up.

"That's not good." Bruce fumbled with the hologram, and managed to zoom in and pan a little, blinking drowsily behind his glasses. "That's...really not good."

"He'll heal. That's a thing he does. He heals," Tony said, then paused. "Usually."

"That's a gastrointestinal perforation. Not great," Bruce said, flicking the hologram so Tony could see better. Bruce moved the hologram a little more, focused on the left half of Peter's chest. "And that's the beginnings of a collapsed lung. And a _really_ broken collarbone."

Every diagnosis sounded like an understatement.

"Perforated eardrums," He said. "He was up against something using either air pressure or sound. They weren't trying to kill him. They could have hit his abdominal aorta if they'd wanted. Whatever...weapon was used, it had three prongs, working in tandem."

"There were eyewitnesses," Tony said, scanning through social media on his tablet. "But nobody got decent video of the Vulture fight. We might have to wait until we can talk to him again."

Bruce held Tony's phone out to him.

"Could you change it to the most recent scan, please?"

Tony did so.

"He's not healing," He blurted, the second the scans switched. It'd been at least an hour and every wound was still open. Really, Tony had anticipated that the minute the kid walked in with a hole still through his chest wall, but he'd had _hope_.

"No, no, he is-" Bruce zoomed in on the collarbone, then flicked to a fractured rib. "Just...not as fast as usual."

"I _knew_ it," Tony said. "He's mutating. From the mutagen mist. And he didn't tell us."

"I don't get why you trusted him to," Bruce said, unfairly laconic. The glaring lights made him look exhausted.

"Why wouldn't I trust him?"

"When hasn't he ran off to go above and beyond?" Bruce shrugged his shoulders, as if it was obvious. "He probably just figured he'd keep going until something went _really_ wrong."

"We can't watch his every move," Tony said. "Well, we can, but he doesn't like it. Says it's 'babying'."

"We should contact Ms. Marvel," Bruce said. "About the terrigen mist. And we need to call May, in the morning. We'll probably be keeping Spidey here for a while."

Eight hours later, they called.

Ms. Marvel was at school- because of course she was, at 10 a.m.

May was next. Calling May was always a nightmare.

"Let me talk to him," She demanded, the second she picked up, when Tony was halfway back to medical already."I saw the fight on the news. I have five minutes of break left. Just let me _talk_ to him."

Peter looked like hell.

Tony couldn't tell if he was paler than usual or if the circles under his eyes were darker.

His left arm was strapped to his body by a shoulder immobilizer, and there was an IV in the back of his right hand. The edges of dressings were just visible under his gown. Purplish bruising was blossoming around the broken collarbone, dark against the medical tape.

He was staring into space when Tony entered, but he was quick to focus on him, moving only his eyes. He'd elevated the head of his bed instead of sitting up; the ridiculous incision from the surgery they'd done was probably hurting him.

"They took my mask," He said, voice cracking. "I told them _specifically_ not to take my mask and they still did. Now like, _twenty people_ know what I look like."

"May wants to talk to you." Tony handed the phone over, listened in on Peter's listless half of the conversation.

"Hey, aunt May," Peter said, aiming for chipper and coming off somewhere near manic. He paused for a reply. "No, I'm fine. I got stabbed but I'm fine. As fine as I usually am after getting stabbed. Tired. From, y'know, from healing. And bored. But fine except that. "

May said something that made him wince.

"I got surgery," He said, as if it wasn't a big deal. "But only so I don't heal with holes in me like Alexis saint Martin."

He held the phone away and covered the microphone with his thumb.

"She wants to know when I can go home," He said, then sighed. " _I_ want to know when I can go home."

"Whenever medical says you can," Tony shrugged, wishing he had an answer. "I have no idea."

"Oh," Peter said, quietly disappointed. He put the phone back to his ear. "Dunno when. Tell people- tell them I got...mono or something. I don't _actually_ have mono. I'm fine except for battle wounds. And you can't visit 'because I'm in a _top secret location._ "

There was a murmur of tinny, high-pitched speech.

"Not even next of kin. It's _that_ secret," Peter said, ever-so-slightly smiling. "So I guess we'll have to get a superhero to bring me my homework. I bet Nat could do it, she's good at disguises."

The sound on the other end of the call was too distant to make out, but briefly came in the pattern of laughter.

"Call back after work, okay?" Peter said. "Love you, bye!"

He thumbed the end-call button, probably before May had a chance to answer. The facade slipped; Peter let his movable shoulder slump and his head fall back, closing his eyes for a second.

"Are you?" Tony asked. Peter just squinted blearily at him, confused. "Fine besides battle wounds."

" _Um_...technically?" He offered, giving a weak one-shouldered shrug. "I mean, I, I _did_ have like, no iron in my body from bleeding a bunch, and maybe, possibly, _probably not_ something I already had, but they fixed that, so I'm _basically_ okay. Really bored though."

Peter had a very poor grasp on the concept of 'okay'. Annoyingly, doctor-patient confidentiality still applied to superheroes.

"I could get you a tablet or something," Tony suggested. "You're not allowed to take apart tech in here, but you could have internet access."

"Nah," Peter said, stifling a yawn. "I'll- I'm just gonna...go to sleep and drain your medical resources."

"You're not 'draining' anything, kid," That prompted an irritated glare, which was a good sign. "I could literally buy you a hospital if I wanted."

"'It's the _principle_ of the thing," Peter muttered, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. "I still got my _dignity_ , Mr. Stark."

"Did you not _sleep_ since you got here?" Tony asked. "At all?"

"I- I just _couldn't_ , really. I think I'm freaking myself out," Peter said, eyelids drooping. "There are so many _people_. And needles. More people are gonna find out who I am and stab me with sharp objects. I dunno if I can trigger my spider-sense psychosomatically, but it feels like I am. It's kinda stopped now though."

He didn't have precognition; he just knew when the next hit was coming. He could sense _when danger was near_ , if you wanted it to sound poetic and not like weaponised, directional anxiety. Tony had seen it triggered in fights- where it was useful- and outside, where it wasn't. Of _course_ it would be bugging him now.

"Christ," He said. "If it was bothering you, why didn't you _say_ anything?"

"'Cause it's kinda ridiculous," Peter gave up on keeping his eyes open. "I'm a superhero. This place shouldn't mess with me so much."

"When you wake up, we're having a talk about how dumb that is," Tony told him. "What can we do about the...spider-sense thing?"

"Stay here," Peter was more mumbling than talking, more to his pillowcase than anything else. The term 'crashing' suddenly made a lot more sense. "It's not so bad when I have allies."

Tony, against his better judgement, stayed.


	4. Chapter 4

Peter woke up to the sound of screaming.

He didn't know if he'd been isolated on purpose, but the walls of his room weren't quite soundproof. He could just about hear noise out in the hall, people talking and machines humming, occasional beeping alarms, the clacking of a copier. And now, high, shaky screeching, someone in a lot more pain than he was.

Tony was gone. He was alone again.

The screaming cut abruptly off, replaced by the rattle of gurney wheels and muffled speech.

Medical was pretty close to Peter's idea of hell.

He'd been unmasked while unconscious. Like it didn't matter. That was what he was angriest about, really; the lack of _agency_. It made him want to hit something.

Everything else just scared him.

They'd turned off the overhead lights in his room, but the hallway's still filtered under the door. Orange sunlight still spilled around the window shades. It made the space feel strangely isolated.

There was a cardboard box on the bedside table, all sleek edges and pretty design, text announcing the tablet inside it. Peter grabbed it with his fingertips and dragged it onto his lap. Twisting to get an actual grip would have hurt too much.

Because he wasn't healing.

Normally- _his_ normally, not normally by any other standard- he'd heal in a couple days at most. He'd be starving and exhausted from the energy debt, but he'd _heal_.

His collarbone was still very, very broken, and the eight-inch surgical incision wasn't knitting back together in the normal, palpable way. His body felt like one giant bruise. He shouldn't even be able to _get_ so hurt.

The idea that he might be healing at a normal- human - pace was _terrifying_. His entire fighting style depended on his superpowers. He fought with the skill of anyone who'd been training for a year. He just did it a lot faster, a lot harder. And he was a lot better at taking hits. Usually.

Hawkeye was just a normal guy. Hawkeye did okay.

Hawkeye had also been training for longer than he'd been alive.

Every move hurt, and hurt a lot- he was on a lower dose of painkillers, to be safe, because he absorbed drugs so _fast_. He couldn't tell if his weird metabolism was slipping, too, or if he'd forgotten how to deal with pain, which was more likely.

He'd also never had someone cut an eight-inch hole in his abdominal wall poke around with his organs for five hours. It was probably supposed to hurt.

Googling terrigen mist just brought up cryptic conspiracy boards and experiences he hadn't had, so he was at a loss there. There wasn't any new information on the Vulture yet, either.

Anything could happen.

There was a knock on the door, and Peter's spider-sense sung like a struck tuning fork. He took a deep breath and tried to look like he wasn't drowning in self-pity.

The woman who stepped in wasn't familiar. Either there'd been a shift change or a lot of people wanted to see his face. The only thing that differentiated her from any other agent was the stethoscope around her neck.

"Hi, Spider-man," She said. She looked slightly taken aback, like he wasn't what she'd expected. "I'm Rose-"  
"Temperature, pulse, blood pressure, _I know_." Peter presented his wristband as best he could. At least they weren't using his real name. "Please just get this over with."

"Okay," Rose said, apparently satisfied that he wasn't going crazy. The other agent had asked him for his location and who the president was, _every time_. Rose kept talking as she slid the temperature probe under his tongue. "It was really _brave_ of you, you know that? Jumping from street level to Avengers, like you did."

If not for the thermometer, Peter would have explained how his relationship to the Avengers actually worked. He wasn't on the team roster, officially. He was Avenger-affiliated _,_ like Scott Lang and King T'Challa. Because of Tony.

Tony'd brought him in, and told him in very simple terms not to screw up. He'd been tag-along kid to the Avengers ever since.

The thermometer beeped.

"Thanks," Peter said. He felt like he'd just been offered a sticker; there was something slightly condescending in her tone.

Rose switched off the IV pump.

"Is it fun?" She asked, eyes on her watch, two fingers on Peter's wrist. "Working with the highest-profile superhero team in the world?"

"I guess," Peter said. He wanted to ask about his healing factor, but he didn't want to seem like he didn't understand his own powers. "They're cool."

"They must be." Rose had got the pleasantly-neutral thing _right_ down; she sounded like an American F.R.I.D.A.Y. After a minute, she wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Peter's upper arm. "I'm going to need some blood in a few minutes, if that's okay?"

"Are you guys trying to steal all my blood?" Peter asked, wincing as the cuff's inflation peaked. "Not that you, like _can't_ steal all my blood, but- I thought me not having enough blood was an issue? Why do you need so much of it?"

"It's all very hush-hush with you, since you're biologically abnormal," Rose said. " _But_ , I have a hunch that they're worried about the transfusion. You could seem absolutely fine, while your body rips apart the donor cells. It sometimes-rarely, I want to stress that- happens with genetically... _different_ people and normal donors."

There was silence until she undid the cuff.

"Don't worry about it, though-" Rose backpedaled; Peter must have looked scared. "-chances are you'll be absolutely fine. And even if you aren't, we'll work around it. We're better equipped than you think."

Two hours after that completely empty reassurance, the cavalry arrived.

Peter had just about managed to fall back asleep when he was woken up by a world-class assassin. He was so tired his eyes burned.

Black Widow was sitting silent and prim in a cheap, plastic chair. She looked completely out of place; her suit and hair stood out against the cream wall. He hadn't heard her come in. For a second, Peter thought he was dreaming. Then she opened her mouth.

"The team has a message for you," She said coolly, holding out a card.

Embossed into the rich paper, in shining gold letters, were six words:

GET WELL SOON

 _You insubordinate brat_.

That made Peter laugh slightly, which hurt like hell.

"Thanks, Nat," He said. Someone had tied a slightly deflated, reflective balloon to the end of his bed. It was supposed to be Steve's shield, but the colours were slightly off. The Safeway tag was still on the string. Either Clint or Sam must have bought it. "Am I in trouble? This looks like a really fancy way to tell me I'm in trouble."

"You're in trouble," Natasha said, pulling a safeway bag off the floor and onto her lap. "But not _immediately_. When you're feeling better, Tony might be grounding you. We got you gatorade."

She offered a bottle, which Peter took.

It made sense that he'd be in trouble. Technically, he'd put them down one man, probably for longer than the mist alone would have.

He held the bottle in his barely-exposed left hand, and undid the sports top with his right. He'd _got_ this.

"Where's Tony?" He asked, then realised how clingy he sounded. "I mean...why is he snarking at me in writing? Am I not important enough for face-to-face snarking?"

"He's in the city, and this is _collaborative_ snarking from the entire team," Natasha's half-smile slipped a little. "We have to talk about this...Vulture character."

"He's probably not as bad as you think he is-" Peter began. His nervous energy was slowly coming back; he chewed the screw-top of the gatorade between sentences. "I was, y'know, my game was off. _Really_ off."

He'd seen the graphs; his red blood cell count had _tanked,_ beyond the norm for blood loss, and hadn't bounced back. Apparently there was a difference between 'double-life' exhausted and 'blood-deciding-not-to-do-its-job' exhausted.

He hadn't noticed.

"It was an...odd fight," Natasha agreed. "But regardless of that, there's almost no information on this guy. We have shaky video and eyewitnesses on twitter, and that's it."

"He's like Falcon with armour," Peter said. Natasha nodded. "And bigger wings, on a sort of...exoskeleton thing, like Rhodey's. He's pretty fast. The engines might be, uh, like, alien? You know the, uh, the ones from 2012, the chitauri? His tech sort of reminded me of theirs."

"Weaponry?" Natasha asked, noting everything down on the phone.  
"Sort of-" Peter awkwardly propped the Gatorade against his pillow so it wouldn't spill, and mimicked a three-clawed structure with his fingers, demonstrated how they moved. "Talons? They can like, come together and apart. They're _really_ sharp. And he's good at, at, working flight into fighting. And he can do this noise, and it's- he blew out my _eardrums_. I still can't hear properly. If you get to hit him, do it _hard_."

"But you still got away," Natasha said. "That's something. There was video, of you getting just about _gored_ by the guy. You did well."

Peter let himself bask in the compliment for a second, even though the fight would have been _underperforming_ a year ago.

Shame it wouldn't apply for long.

"I'm kinda, not, uh," He caught the sentence halfway out, tried to organise his thoughts better. It was very, very hard to keep his voice steady. "I might be losing my powers. A bit. My healing factor's slowed down a lot."

"Don't worry about it" Natasha commanded, the slightest hint of panic creeping onto her face. She was the reason Peter was so good at reading micro-expressions; she used them almost exclusively. "You're still healing fast, and chances are this is _temporary._ Some people just have odd reactions to terrigen mist."

He was either freaking her out with the news, or freaking himself out and thus freaking her out because her actual colleagues weren't teary, sleep-deprived teenagers.

"But what if it _isn't_ temporary?" He was whining and overreacting and he knew it. He shouldn't be so concerned about being _normal_ ; he'd survived fifteen years of it. He could adjust back again if he really had to. Probably.

He just wouldn't be able to be Spider-Man.

"Then…" The half-second Natasha hesitated for was hell. "You're still going to be as smart as Tony, and a lot less of an asshole. Even if you _weren't_ friends with most of the team, you'd still be valuable to us, okay?"

"Okay…" Peter said, trying to look like he believed her.

He _wasn't_ going to cry over this; he was stronger than that. At this point, Tony probably would have told him to _calm down_ or _think about it logically_ and he would have.

A second later, he was being swept into maybe the gentlest hug he'd ever gotten. Natasha slung one arm over his good shoulder, the other just below the body strap of his immobilizer. She didn't pull him close; she didn't want to hurt him.

Peter clung, and whether he cried or not was between the two of them.


	5. Chapter 5

Kamala was walking back from a good-by-fight-standards-fight when it happened.

The wind ruffled the knee-high grass around her. She looked up.

Something was flying overhead, cutting out the starlight. Something _big,_ much too big to be a bird.

The shape _circled_ as she moved, sweeping overhead like a vulture.

Vulture.

Oh _no._

She'd seen the tweets and the obscure news reports; the guy had taken down Spider-Man. Spider-Man could lift ten tons. Spider-Man had fallen six stories and gotten up to start fighting immediately after. As far as she knew, he was basically invulnerable.

The Vulture had put him out for almost a _week_. There hadn't been a sign of him in literally seven days.

Kamala cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted at the sky.

"I already fought my daily supervillain!" She yelled. "Leave me alone!"

There was silence.

Kamala was suddenly caught in the green glare of two spotlights. The shape dove downwards, circular engines flaring to life.

Kamala embiggened her hand and _swatted_ at the Vulture. It was like slapping a nail-studded baseball bat; something needled into her hand, and the impact was nowhere near as effective as she'd hoped.

There was nobody around for _miles_ ; he was targeting her specifically. For _some_ reason.

"What do you _want_?" She called up. "Seriously, what are you trying to achieve?"

The spotlights swelled in diameter- he had some sort of apertures on them.

The Vulture sank to the ground in front of her, his wings crushing the grass around them.

"You." His voice was cold, robotic, and _incredibly_ creepy.

Kamala shrank down until the grass was taller than her. The Vulture's feet were elevated by towering steel spikes, sharpened to an edge on two sides and barbed on the others.

The Vulture took to the air again.

Either she was about to be kidnapped- and possibly stashed in a very evil bird's nest alongside Spider-Man- or the Vulture was asking her out.

It wouldn't be the first time.

The Vulture wasn't conclusively linked to anything too horrible. But people who tried to disembowel Avengers usually weren't good people.

Nobody knew for sure where Spider-Man was, or what had happened to him. There hadn't been a statement from the Avengers, despite the media buzz. According to various sources, he was MIA, dead, had staged the fight to quit superhero-ing. Kamala may or may not have contributed to the obsessive internet discussion.

Running back towards the city meant leading the Vulture towards more people, back out meant losing her cover. If she stayed tiny, she could think of a decent plan.

The green beams of his eyes swept back and forth, then switched off completely.

Kamala's night vision vanished. She was really starting to hate this guy.

She thought back to the Spider-Man fight. The Vulture fought feet-first, and didn't go down easy. Just _punching_ him probably wouldn't work too well, but he had to have weak spots. Spidey just hadn't found them.

There was a rush of air, grit pummeling Kamala's back like fists. She just barely managed to dodge the massive talons as they came crashing down. She took off sprinting again.

The Vulture could _see_ her somehow; he tore chunks of grass and soil up from the ground, leaving a trail of divots where she'd been. She had _really_ not signed up for this.

A foot came down beside her. She leapt, clinging to an exposed bit of flight suit. The Vulture made an unsuccessful attempt to grab for his own ankle, then just picked up speed. Kamala let herself slip back to normal size; staying small would waste energy.

As soon as she could, she hooked an arm around the Vulture's other leg and drew them together, which didn't seem to phase him whatsoever. She got her legs around the Vulture's calves, clung to the cloth over his abdomen with both hands.

Kamala wasn't normally afraid of heights, but their current height was hundreds of feet, and her fear was very much justified. She vaguely remembered a scene from incredibles where elastigirl had stretched her body into a parachute. She _might_ have to do that if worst came to worst.

She frantically embiggened, trying to be heavy enough to bring them down. The Vulture countered by shooting up into the sky, _through_ layers of clouds. The air was thinner, _too_ thin- spots were starting to dance in front of Kamala's eyes. She shrank again, clambered onto the back of the Vulture's thigh as the world swayed.

The wings rotated with a series of complex joints. If she could punch them out-

God, it was cold.. She was shivering.

They were surrounded by stars and dark sky.

Kamala slammed a massive fist into the Vulture's wing joint, and the world went black.

One moment she was clinging to the Vulture, ice crystals forming on her eyelashes; the next, she was tumbling through warm air towards the ground, the next she was being suspended by talons in the back of her suit. Her lungs were on fire; she was gasping for breath.

She finally woke up in the Vulture's arms, normal-sized and groggy. They were flying lower; the clouds were above them. Below them was…

Buildings.

Buildings meant _people_ , meant _property_ , meant a hell of a lot of collateral damage.

This was _not_ her lucky day.

Kamala shrank, dangling from the Vulture's coarse sleeve for a second before scrambling up his arm. He couldn't flail enough to catch her in the air, surely.

She went to work on his wings again. The technology looked almost alive; the metal was the colour of corroded bronze, strangely organic in places. Chitauri-esque.

She couldn't realistically destroy the mechanism without a screwdriver at least, but she could take out the wings. They just wouldn't have the soft landing she'd hoped for. She grabbed a wing and hauled upwards. The metal was just starting to groan when Vulture tucked the other wing in close and careened into a spiral, tossing her off.

He caught her by the hair. The jolt felt like he was trying to rip her scalp off.

A red-and-gold blur roared up from the ground.

"Iron Man!" Kamala just had time shriek before the Vulture started screaming.

It was high-pitched, like a mosquito machine, and louder than it had any right to be. Kamala slammed her hands over her ears, the noise vibrating through her bones.

"I'll drop her." The Vulture's voice was more robotic than an A.I.

He did, in fact, drop her, but only because she swung a fifty-pound fist up and, at very least, broke his arm.

She was falling, falling, straining to be smaller and smaller, to put physics on her side. You could drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft...

Kamala hit the ground at a few miles an hour, slightly jolted but intact. She returned to normal size, staring up the aerial standoff.

"You can't touch me," The Vulture's voice was distant. "I'm not on any of your _lists_ , I'm not on anybody's radar. You'll get thrown in the Raft."

Of course. Accords. Iron Man _couldn't_ touch him.

But Kamala could.

She reached up, the bones in her arms and hands elongating like stretched taffy, and wrapped her fingers around the Vulture's ankles.

She yanked downwards.

Twenty different places on her body lit up in pain. The Vulture crashed into the ground.

Her body was studded with carved metal feathers. In her thighs, her shoulders, her chest. Kamala crushed the Vulture's wings inwards, wrapping them around his body like the tortilla in a very violent burrito.

Iron Man plunged towards her as she started yanking the feathers out. She wouldn't be able to shapeshift again, not with so much damage.

"We gotta-" She waved her free hand, frantic. "Get him!"

"This is bad," Iron Man said, landing in front of her, hovering hands around her shoulders, ready to move in and keep her upright. "This is _very_ bad."

"I'm gonna be _fine_ ," Kamala insisted, wrenching a feather out of her lung. "I have, like, instant healing. As soon as I get these out…"

She gestured to one of the closing wounds. She could just make out the Vulture, scrambling to his feet, trying to shuffle off. She had to commend him for persistence at least.

"You _really_ shouldn't be here," Iron man told her, faceplate receding so she could see his expression. He pointed at the Vulture, then at her. "I'm going to deal with him. _You're_ going inside. And _staying inside_ , okay? Follow the signs to medical if you need to."

She was almost _honoured_ to get the Iron-Dad treatment.

The door was opened _for_ her, as she reached out. For a minute she thought she'd walked into some kind of secret garden scenario, and the Avengers were hiding wafish youths who wore sunglasses and scarves inside, at night. It wouldn't be the strangest thing they'd done.

The guy in front of her had one arm in a contraption that looked like an overenthusiastic sling. He was leaning slightly against the door, a pale sliver of skin visible between the scarf and glasses. His posture was limp; like it hurt to stand up.

He was wearing slightly oversized Captain America pajamas. The white circles and stars on the shields were glowing faintly in the dark.

He looked like something from a much cuddlier version of Mad Max.

" ," he said, propping the door open with his foot and tugging the scarf up further. "Hi. Do you need to go to medical? You got...very stabbed."

"No, no, I healed. Who…?" The question died in her mouth. The voice was familiar.

Kamala scrolled through the updated roster in her mind. Iron Man, Vision, War Machine, sometimes Hawkeye or Falcon, Black Widow-

 _Oh_.

"Um," Kamala squeaked.

"Oh, yeah, uh." He awkwardly offered his free hand, which Kamala awkwardly shook before stepping inside. "I'm Spider-Man."

"What happened to you?" She regretted the words before they were out of her mouth. "I mean, no offence, but, I, uh, I thought you had a healing factor?"

The Vulture had clearly been a lot harder on him.

"Well," Spider-Man said, "You know how you were like, 'Don't freak out but you might change completely at a genetic level', and _I_ was like 'screw you, I'm Spider-Man, I do what I want?'"

"Yeah?"

"You were right," Spider-Man phrased it like a confession. The door finished a slow swing shut behind them, and they were in near-complete darkness. "Friday, lights to 70%."

The lights flared on through the compound, as if to illuminate their path. Kamala gawped for a second. She was concerned about the implications of Spider-Man not healing, but the compound was _distractingly_ awesome.

"D'you want, like, food?" Spider-Man asked. "I'm always starving after healing. And it takes _me_ hours."

Kamala ended up eating cereal by the handful, straight from the box, while instant pesto pasta spun in the fanciest microwave she'd ever seen. Spider-Man had flopped onto the hellishly expensive couch, resting his head on the back, and given her free reign of the kitchenette.

"We gotta talk. Not- not immediately, in general. Sorry, I'm not making sense. Blame the opioids," He said, then evidently realised how bad that sounded. "Not, like, _for fun_ opioids, that wouldn't work with my biology- painkiller opioids. I need your...email. Or something."

"Are you asking for my _number_?" Kamala asked, cornflake crumbs falling from her mouth.

"No!" Spider-Man blurted. Kamala couldn't see his face, but the tips of his ears were tinging red. "Uh. Yes, but not like _that_. Not that I _wouldn't_ \- you know stuff about terrigen mist."

Kamala was having a very, very weird evening. She had a _lot_ of questions. Did Spider-Man live with the Avengers? How badly injured was he? Were the pyjamas a political statement, or just out of necessity?

"What do you want to know?" She asked.

" _Don't_ tell Iron Man, okay?" Spider-Man tugged up his sleeve, using the fingertips of his left hand. "Is this… normal? Is this _related_?"

Kamala stared.

Angry raised lines streaked up his arm, running from wrist to elbow before blurring and vanishing completely. They converged at a blotchy torus of inflammation centred above his wrist joint, like the infection around a piercing.

She gagged on the paste of cereal in her mouth.

" _No_ ," She said. "Not related. And _definitely_ not normal."


	6. Chapter 6

Peter had been getting better, keyword being _had_.

He caught his reflection's eye in the en suite mirror. He looked exactly as had been reported- alive, but not _quite_ well. Tired and drawn, but recovering. There was a thin, blur-like thing at the egde of each of iris, but he couldn't tell if it was just a trick of the light. Trying to look at it long enough to tell made his eyes sting.

His hearing had come back, his collarbone had got its shit together, he'd gone from eating opioids like candy to eating acetaminophen like candy-mostly to convince medical he was okay- and the incision, while still painful and annoying, was healing. Everything hurt, but considerably less so.

The streaks along his wrist had faded to slightly puffy pinstripes. Like he'd expected them to, because his body had done a lot of weird stuff while genetically volatile, and a rash wasn't exactly up there.

That'd changed overnight.

Twizzlers, he thought, probing gingerly at one with his thumb. They were _under_ the skin, not on it, textured between the spongy bounce-back of a vein and the rubbery feel of gummy candy, weirdly tender and warm to the touch. He could feel the tug of skin against one set as he palpated the other.

The patches of skin where they came together had turned a rough, bruisy black, haloed in scarlet inflammation.

This was bad, really bad.

Peter abandoned the prospect of showering and walked back through to his room. A section of the back wall was plastered in blue-tacked get well cards. People'd been sending them to the tower, because he didn't have a public address. There was a horrible variety, especially in the writing inside. Wonky, little-kid writing, and the kind of fancy cursive it took years to get the hang of. Some people had cut out newspaper articles and included those. Like they were asking if he remembered them, the time with the bus or the fire or one of the many, many showy attacks. Things he was doing nothing against, now.

The more symptoms he manifested, the longer he was trapped.

Nobody had said he couldn't leave. It was a matter of things being _better_ out there, in theory. Apparently, being out of school and useless was offset by access to people whose complete cluelessness wasn't caused by something preexisting. Because it wasn't like he had anything to _do_ back home, with the powers he still had.

Everything except his healing factor was intact.

He dug through the dresser of borrowed clothes, picked a soft sweater with the tags cut out and outsized jeans. The sleeves landed at his fingertips; effective, but uncomfortable. It had been a couple days, and he still wasn't sure about _telling_.

Either he could run crying to the nearest Avenger and get briefly dragged through medical on his way to a lab, or he could try and get the hell out of dodge before someone could find out and tattle.

There was a conflict of interests. Peter was interested in getting home and back to work as soon as possible; everyone else in his life was interested in preventing him from doing exactly that.

Because they didn't trust him.

It was incredibly annoying. Spider-Man of all people didn't need to be coddled _._

Chances were, the new... _developments_ would get him smothered with both medical and scientific concern if people knew. He'd done self-study before; that sort of thing took a long, long time.

He padded barefoot through to the communal space. Bruce had sent him a string of emails with subjects like "Ignoring medical advice and why it's a bad idea", "Ignoring medical advice and why it's a bad idea (pt.2)" and "Things that have to happen before you can go home"

That third one sounded almost promising, if he ignored most of the actual email. He'd hidden too much for too long to go back, now. He'd just have to tough it.

Bruce was sitting at the meeting table- one of many tables, because apparently the Avengers had needed a table for every possible table-related activity in the world- typing on a laptop. Natasha and Vision were doing something faux-domestic in the kitchenette. The scene was about as comfortable and welcoming as a summer camp icebreaker.

Peter wandered through the kitchenette and got a glass of orange juice, then joined Bruce at the table.

"Good morning," Bruce said, without looking up. "Are you being grouchy at me about my emails, or because you just woke up?"

"Both." Peter perched cross-legged on the faux leather chair across from him, trying to minimise contact with the freezing material. "You said I could go home."

He took a sip of his juice, then regretted it. The acidity burned the skin under his tongue, and he had to resist the urge to stick a finger in his mouth and poke at the sore spot.

"You could still have this conversation with someone who _actually works in medical_ ," Bruce shut his laptop. "Just so you know."

"I'm not going back unless I really, really have to." Peter said. He'd spent at least eight months re-aligning his own fractures and self-suturing. His threshold for calling in medical help _began_ with unconsciousness. "I don't get why I can't leave."

Bruce sighed. Peter wished Tony was around to talk to instead, and not doing stupid political stuff in France.

"Because we can't be sure what's going to happen."

"I get that," Peter said, picking at a loose thread on his sweater. "But if I'm gonna, like, violate basic biology and stuff until this is out of my system, why can't I do it _in my house_?"

If he did get home, he'd skip out on the whole quietly saying ' _fuck you_ ' to biology thing and get back to his life, because there was going to be a point where he could and it was going to be soon. Soon-ish. He was making rough a week's worth of progress every two days or so, counting sleep.

Everything was still much more painful than it had any right to be.

"Let's consider a scenario," Bruce pushed his glasses up, pressed his palms together. "As of two days ago, when you decided that doctors know nothing, you still didn't seem to be producing haemoglobin. If your body, for whatever reason- pardon my french- decides to fuck itself over again, what happens?"

Behind him, Natasha was looking suddenly, very, not interested. Her default look was not caring, but that was _aggressive_ not caring.

"I come back here." Peter answered. Things were still going wrong, but not badly. Nothing debilitating. He could've handled it on his own, now that he was starting to get better.

He was missing a lot and he knew it. He'd been in the middle of nowhere for over a week, and the stress of it was driving him crazy. He was hyper-aware of the resources he was consuming; both medically and in terms of sheer time, and he'd been keeping track of everything that happened in New York and who ended up fighting it in his place. He'd have to bake daredevil cookies or something, to say thanks.

"Ideally, yes, but that also means waiting the time it takes to get you here." Bruce continued. "And if something went drastically wrong, you'd probably get a standard emergency response. And they wouldn't know what to _do_ with you."

It was like he was talking to a toddler. The explanation was slow, simple, dumbed-down. Accommodating.

Frankly, it sounded paranoid.

"We could," Peter shifted posture, leaning in, trying to look persuasive. "We could work around that, right? It's not hard to stay out of the E.R, and my aunt knows what to do, if, if I start getting sick."

Sometimes, there'd be multiple people in a day. Multiple people in an _hour_. Even if he assumed exactly zero big attacks, a lot could go wrong in the time he should have spent patrolling.

Nothing kept him from patrol. _Nothing_. He'd done the full few hours with broken bones. And he had proof that things went wrong in his absence; the Vulture had attacked Ms. Marvel because he wasn't around. It seemed horribly unfair, that she'd had to fight _his_ enemy.

"Do you miss her?"

The question was very out of the blue. If Peter'd been slightly more manipulative or slightly more desperate, he would have exploited it.

"Uh," He said, because he was focused and eloquent like that. "Yeah, but that's not the _point_."

He was mostly just _afraid_ for her. He missed May, a lot, but he missed everything. He missed school and his friends and everything about the city, but he mostly missed being productive. The lost time was eating at him- he couldn't think of anything else.

He couldn't just stay in the middle of nowhere.

"Look," Bruce was reaching for Peter's hands. Peter quietly crossed his arms, because if Bruce knew, then everything was over. "I know you don't like it here. And I know you don't like convalescence in general, but this is your safest option."

"I just don't feel like keeping me here, like, indefinitely is the best choice." Even as Peter was saying it, it sounded whiney. "I think I'd have, like, a smoother recovery at home. This place stresses me out."

He was stressing everyone else out, too, being _needy_. The constant, concerned glances and outright fretting had to take a lot of energy. Peter was trying his best to be okay, but even faking it was tiring.

Recovery wasn't normally like this.

"Well…" Bruce said. "Go back to medical, get everything tested, prove that you're stable, and you won't have to be here. Do you want food?"

"No." Peter mumbled, going back to his thread-picking. He was slowly working his way back from the medicalised no-fun diet, but he'd completely lost his appetite and about a stone with it.

"Tough." Natasha said, taking advantage of the break in conversation. "Vision's making you cream of wheat."

Peter looked up at the bemused android, who was holding a wooden spoon.

"I was told this was the most...beneficial course of action." Vision explained.

Robots shouldn't be capable of puppydog eyes, but Vision seemed to manage it perfectly fine. That was definitely a Natasha strategy, because Vision was _just_ to the left of the uncanny valley and therefore difficult to be upset with.

Peter shrugged. Being compliant made you 'accounted for', according to Natasha. People worried less. You got away with more. And he needed to get away with a lot. Radical changes to his anatomy, for example.

"Sure," He said. "Cream of wheat is fine."

Cream of wheat wasn't fine. Cream of wheat, like everything else he'd eaten in the past few days, would be gross and tasteless and require actual mental effort to consume.

Peter began planning.

He did end up going back to medical. Just not for the reasons anyone had expected.


	7. Chapter 7

Tony was used to coming back from trips like this. Returning to unlit buildings at two, three in the morning, local time, and tiptoeing around to avoid waking anyone up. Rhodey'd gone to bed right after they got back, leaving Tony to his paperwork and jet lag. Tony had opted to go all the way around on the circadian swingset, and was settling in for a morning of coffee and bureaucracy-hatred when Friday told him that Peter was gone.

Not _gone_ , she'd backpedalled. Just not in the building. He'd taken his tablet, but turned it off, so he couldn't be contacted that way.

Tony flicked up the coordinates of the tablet, trying to stay calm. The tracker was moving fast, but following the roads, which meant a car rather than another stint with a flying lunatic, but didn't really offer explanation as to _why_. Friday didn't have an answer, which, okay. Fine. He could work with that.

He walked down the hall to Bruce's room, because Peter _liked_ Bruce, so much that he'd been talking to him in grouchy, angst-ridden complete sentences rather than grouchy, angst-ridden monosyllables. If anyone had managed to coax an explanation out of him, it would be Bruce.

'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' was playing at slowly increasing volume as Bruce fumbled for his glasses. By the time he actually managed to grab them from the nightstand and put them on, the song was so loud that it was getting painful.

"I'm awake, I'm awake," Bruce told the ceiling. The music stopped. "Jesus, Tony, what is it?"

"Hey," Tony said. "Do you have any idea why Spider-Man has hitchhiked off into the ether?"

Bruce took a minute to process that, stalling like a frozen computer.

"He did what?" he asked.

"Left," Tony said, he pulled up a hologram of the surrounding area, held it in front of Bruce's face. The tracking dot was streaking down the highway, losing them time.

"Look, Tony…" Bruce rubbed his eyes. "I'm not his babysitter. I— he does things without explaining them to the nearest grown-up, sometimes. He's allowed to do that. He shouldn't, in this case, but he can."

"This isn't safe," Tony said. "He knows it's not safe. We're _helping_ him."

"I don't know what you want me to tell you," Bruce said. "I don't know what he's doing. Do you want me to stay in case he comes back?"

It took all of ten minutes for Tony to be back on the highway, trapped behind some disgustingly boxy family car with an obnoxious sticker in the back window.

Peter hadn't taken much, according to security footage. A set of clothes, a couple books, a backpack. No food or water or webshooters— he couldn't be going far. That, or he'd got someone set up on the other side.

Peter was smart, _really_ smart. He knew he wasn't up to this.

Tony wasn't paranoid enough to be monitoring him, not quite, but anyone with eyes could tell how badly this was going. When Tony'd left for Paris, Peter hadn't been told, because he'd been on his fourteenth consecutive hour of sleep. Normally, that was a sign of rapid healing at work. Now, they couldn't be so sure.

It seemed paradoxical. All medical really wanted was some decent bloodwork. If he wanted out, the worst he'd have to deal with was a needle in his arm, which meant something else was wrong.

Best case scenario, this was just another attempt at showing off. Another showy step in the blind quest for esteem every high schooler was on. If Tony told himself that this was another case of Peter confusing _dangerous_ for _impressive_ , he could almost believe it.

Sometimes it felt like that was the default. Like there was a language barrier, and the concept of risk evaluation was as untranslatable as _saudade_ or _schadenfreude_. And that was incredibly frustrating. But it didn't seem to be what was happening here. In those moments, Peter was childish and petty, but he was _vocal_ about it. He argued and slammed doors, and would throw both tantrums and objects if pushed far enough. This wasn't the same.

The tracker was moving back towards the city, which wasn't surprising. Peter had an attachment to the place. It made sense. Incorporating a place into your identity was probably much easier when you didn't have houses to flit between on a seasonal basis.

Maybe this was just the way Spider-Man snapped when completely overwhelmed. The situation wasn't a pretty one. He was too young to drink and too old to cry about it, so chasing familiarity made sense. Stupid, self-absorbed sense, but there was at least _some_ kind of logic to it.

Peter still had the ripple effect that all kids did. He wasn't the only victim here; everyone else was dragged into the situation by his utter inability to deal with it with an ounce of emotional maturity. He wasn't usually this bad, though.

Maybe this was an attempt at revenge. The situation seemed almost premeditated in how irritating it was. Natasha would have pulled something like this, when she was younger— fighting back via self-endangerment. The kind of thing people did when they felt utterly overpowered and trapped.

Maybe Tony just didn't want to admit that it might be his fault.

Peter wasn't that type of ruthless. He _communicated,_ the vast majority of the time. He'd tried to undermine Tony's authority far too many times for that to make sense, and he was secure in his right to do that without resorting to manipulation. But Peter was— or, had started as— Tony's pet project. His problem. Their relationship had changed, slowly but dramatically. Tony wouldn't be so worried about a pet project.

The Vulture had been after the Avengers, originally. He'd only attacked Peter to get to them. Maybe this was another, less drastic, attempt to lure them out, for whatever reason. How would Peter react, in the face of a threat like that?

They were definitely on a course back to New York, which suggested Peter planned on doing something _really_ stupid. It was imperative that he waited until he'd healed enough for his life to be _safe_. Not safe in the sense of having minimal danger (a concept that had gone so far out the metaphorical window, it would have punched through the adjacent house), but safe in the sense that he could go about his normal combination of gymnastics and brutal violence without his insides becoming outsides on the first flip. If it were anyone else, they'd accept a gradual recovery, but Peter was a stubborn brat and avoiding self-disembowelment was probably the best he could manage.

It was a long, long drive into the city, traffic and the air growing thicker as the suburbs began to fade. The night sky was black overhead— the streetlights slowly overpowered the stars.

By the time Tony finally caught up to Peter, he was on foot. And he wasn't even wearing shoes— the tops of his socks were white, and the soles were black with grime. He'd left in jeans and a dark hoodie, neither of which fit very well but both of which were very inconspicuous.

Peter glanced over his shoulder at the car. Tony waved, and he sprinted for the nearest subway entrance immediately, leaping the stairs to get away faster. Tony hoped that he didn't plan on actually taking the subway. The air down there was like a petri dish. He'd be exposed to less licking the doorknob in a kindergarten classroom.

What had they done to prompt this? What did he need that they weren't providing?

Why was he running?

Eventually, the tracker met the area of space occupied by Peter's apartment. Trackers SM01 and SM02— the cheap, semi functional versions of the webshooters- blinked into existence as he began to move away.

He wouldn't.

He couldn't. A week and a half after a laparotomy was when most people could just about touch their toes, provided they were on the good drugs, which Peter wasn't. There was no way in hell he could manage locomotion by aerial arts, no matter how much he wanted to.

The trackers moved slowly— at walking speed, not web-slinging.

Tony ditched the car eventually, emerged from his garage into the cool pre-dawn. He followed the triad of trackers on foot through the city.

Something— probably some _one_ — had drawn Peter out here.

A brief review of corroborated sources didn't reveal anything dramatic, even once Friday stopped filtering out the ocean of absurd clickbait. Some of New York's umpteen other street superhumans were moving in to fill the gap Spider-Man had left, and the Vulture hadn't been up to much, besides a few tech-based robberies. Unless Peter'd developed a sudden and intense commitment to the defense of warehouses full of computer parts he could never afford, that wasn't the answer either.

Tony found him plodding steadily along a deserted street in Brooklyn, eyes trained on his tablet. He slung an arm around his shoulders, dragging him into his personal bubble.

"Hi," he said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Okay, so— hear me out," Peter said. His voice had shifted timbre, like he couldn't breathe through his nose. "This— this isn't me fighting anything, I promise. This is— look, there's this building, right? Where— the Vulture's not there often, but, but his tech is."

"And how do you know that?" Tony said. The relief was like stepping in from a blizzard, because as depressing as it was to think about, 'upright, lucid, and being annoying' was one of the better scenarios here.

"I tracked sightings to one building and watched the cameras," Peter shrugged, sniffled. When had that started? "I- he's usually not out too late, and I saw him ditch the wingsuit, so I— we can go check that out."

Tony should have been giving a very firm 'no' and dragging him back to the compound, but he hesitated, for just a fraction of a second. It was a stupid plan, but a stupid plan that might get Peter to actually stay down for two seconds.

"Don't you want to try?" Peter asked, pleading. "You— you said that nobody makes perfect technology. There'll— there's gotta be chinks the armour, somewhere— we, we'd know how to win even if he'd got the chance to rebuild."

"You know, there are these people in the world, called responsible, uninjured adults who you could have told about this?" Tony said. "Instead of running off in the middle of the night to risk your life. Amazing concept, isn't it?

Peter looked utterly crestfallen.

"I'm not, though," he said, sounding tired and petulant. "I'm— I'm breaking inanimate objects and then I'll be done and things will be fine and I might get better before he can hurt other people."

Sometimes, Tony wondered why paranoia was so much less persuasive when _he_ did it. Peter being scared of things made people want to give him hugs and financial assistance. Tony being paranoid just made people condescending.

"Petey." The nickname upset him— he abruptly became a small, tense form against Tony's own. "I get that you want to stop the evil bird guy. That's not the problem. The problem is that you didn't tell anyone. You ran off for some midnight sock-hop and gave everyone responsible for you a heart attack. You can't _do that_ to us."

Peter wilted further, shrinking away from the physical contact.

"I'm not done. I'll help," Tony said. Peter's face lit up. "But not because I approve of this. Because you're being stupid and childish, and you need to stop."

"Okay," Peter said. He wriggled free and continued along the street.

By the time they got to the building he'd sought out, the sun was starting to come up. The building in question was a vacant, boarded-up thing, slouching on the sidewalk like an overheated ice-cream cake. The crumbling brick was cast in weak sunlight, colours coming to life as Peter pried the metal cover off one window and tumbled gracelessly through the hole.

Despite the fact that it probably broke some code of Spider-Honor, he didn't immediately clamber up the wall like an asshole. He followed Tony up the rusting stairs— which was a bad sign. An indication of just how unprepared he'd be if everything went south.

Tony ran a hand over the face of his watch. He'd armed himself, as always, but that might not be enough.

Almost every wall on the top floor had been knocked through, leaving a gaping, cluttered space. A breeze blew through the empty skylights, stirring up storms of dust. The rest of the building had been the ghost of office space— mouldering fire doors and telltale stained drywall— but this looked almost residential. Dust sheets covered what was probably furniture.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Tony asked. The floor was clean, in the sense that the blanket of dust over it wasn't uniform. People had been walking there, very recently.

"In storage it basically looks like a super evil backpack." Peter took a few steps out into the space, standing under the biggest skylight. "Okay, if he went through that window, and…"

He turned on one heel, took a few steps towards the far side of the building. He didn't seem at all apologetic— more just anxious. It was difficult to tell, without the jumpy, nervous energy that normally marked such moods.

Tony didn't have time to ruminate on that thought, though. Peter, twenty feet or so away, held up what was clearly an evil backpack. A faint metallic screech whined through the air.

Then half of the room exploded.

The air was suddenly a soup of dust and debris, almost opaque. Tony's ears rang as he armed his single gauntlet, the metal creeping out from his watch. It felt woefully insufficient.

There'd been a shockwave but no heat, and it hadn't been the backpack- it could have been worse.

"You know—" Peter's voice, from somewhere near the window. It was cut off by the deafening vibrations of another shockwave. The tech was familiar, and fairly common— they'd had it around since Bruce first became the Hulk, almost a decade ago. Simple sonic weaponry.

Tony made his way towards the sound, slowed by the shitty visibility. He could see about a foot out in any direction. The dust in the air stung in his lungs. He couldn't breathe. Air conditions and outright anxiety were ganging up on him. Another wave of vibrations ran through the building, visible in the swirling dust. Tony felt it in his bones, rattling inside his chest like the beat of a bass drum, the harmonics hitting so hard his vision blurred. How many blasts would add up to a concussion?

He opened his mouth to call out, choked on dust, the dryness of it wicking the moisture from the inside of his throat.

This was bad, very bad, and May would make good on her promise to murder him if he didn't keep her kid in one piece. Peter was good at fighting wounded but only because he was good at ignoring his limits. Whatever was going on in his body was already draining him massively and it showed, in the sluggishness of his speech and the restricted range of motion. He wasn't _safe_.

God, Tony'd been stupid. this was a trap. just because Peter hadn't seen that didn't mean it wasn't obvious. Peter was new to this. Peter had an excuse.

There was a whining noise in the aftermath of each thrumming explosion, roaring through a spectrum of pitch as if it were designed to disorient. It took less than a minute to pick out Peter's silhouette. He'd kept to the floor but also kept his distance— he was darting through the maze of boxes and dust sheets, moving like a wounded animal.

The other guy was just as showy as everyone else Peter fought. He emerged through the fog of dust like something from a horror film. For a brief moment, quilted cloth looked almost like skin. Set into the mask, in place of eyes, were two dark lenses. The tech was obvious. It enveloped the man's hands and crawled up his wrists like ivy, eventually merging seamlessly back into the suit. each gauntlet glowed, a mess of moving parts and unnatural light.

It was like they were all trying to make their outfits even more over-designed than the Spider-Man suit.

The man raised his fists, close into his chest like a boxer about to jab. He pressed something with his thumb, charging the gauntlet. Tony took aim.

Watching the quilted stranger go hurtling back through twenty-odd feet of clutter was incredibly satisfying.

Watching him get right back up, not so much.

"Hey!" Peter complained, then broke off into a coughing fit. "That— I— I was _handling_ that."

He'd pulled the strings of his hoodie (which was really Bruce's) tight, so the cloth covered his mouth and nose. He was slumped against the mystery object he'd been using as cover.

"You know, Spidey," Quilt Guy said. "I wasn't expecting you to be such a damsel in distress. It's a little disappointing."

Peter stood on tiptoe to peer over the thing under the dust sheet.

"I wasn't expecting you to be such an idiot," he said. He fired one-armed, the webbing arcing across the space to hit one of the glowing gauntlets perfectly.

The man raised both hands. Rippling waves of pressure cut through the air to the left of them, while the right gauntlet made a sad, wet _ka-chunk_ noise as the webbing clogged its mechanisms. Peter giggled almost maniacally, and the single loudest sound Tony had ever experienced hit them in reply.

It was a sharp, quick increase in both pitch and volume, until it was suddenly too high. Sound became sensation at however many kilohertz, the screeching fading into a sort of energised silence— loud enough to be a tactile experience, but too high pitched to make out.

Peter wasn't faring as well. He'd curled up with a hand over each ear, tears budding in his eyes. The pain was obvious.

Tony didn't dramatically leap the boundary. This wasn't the time to be showy— he just _moved_. A stronger repulsor blast stunned the stranger and singed his _stupid_ costume, and another took out the second gauntlet. Possibly a few fingers as well, but Tony was past caring. The lenses of the mask whirred as they focused on him, ringed in dark metal like spyglasses.

"Don't worry, Iron Man," the man said said, slightly muffled by the mask. He raised his hands, as if in surrender. "I'm not here to steal your sugar baby."

The gauntlet was getting uncomfortably warm. It hadn't been designed for this.

"Spidey's not really my type," he said. "Why, are you jealous?"

"I'm here for a reason," the man said. "And you—"

A beautiful mahogany end-table slammed into his chest, knocking him backwards. Peter stepped nonchalantly around the object they'd been using as cover and webbed the man's legs to the floor, before kicking the dresser away and cocooning him completely.

"I resent that statement." he said, crossing his arms. "Tony, could you—"

He gestured to the man on the floor, and stumbled back past Tony before waiting for an answer. Due to both stifling bureaucracy and a lack of further instructions, Tony abandoned the webbed-down man and followed him through to the stairwell.

Which was empty.

 _Fuck_.


	8. Chapter 8

Kamala didn't like the woods. Partially because they were creepy this early in the morning, partially because this particular set of woods happened to be a state away from her actual hometown. The air smelled like compost, various animals were making various creepy noises, and her position— tiny, and curled up in a pouch on a constantly unstable belt— was getting uncomfortable.

But really, she was focusing on the negatives for a reason.

That reason was Black Widow. The Black Widow, the one and only, who was so awesome that looking at her made Kamala feel like she might actually die. There were more awesome people in the world, of course, but none of them brought her on missions.

Even if this mission did make her feel a little like she was in a horror movie.

They were following bloody handprints. Faint, brownish smears with varying numbers of fingers, just below shoulder-level on the tree trunks in a scattered line out from the compound, like someone had stopped to lean on them.

Well. Mostly bloody. The rest was… not really up for consideration, because Kamala didn't want to gross herself out too much.

It was like they were in a super dark and gory version of Hansel and Gretel, following nasty, crusty blood prints rather than breadcrumbs. She couldn't see them unless she stood up, but the first one had stuck with her once it clicked what it was.

She was pretty sure she was just there because Spider-Man wasn't.

They weren't really alike in terms of skillset, but they were both unmentioned by the accords and usually didn't have further commitments. Natasha'd briefed her on this particular mission, after she'd materialised out of thin air in Kamala's room that morning and seen her eating cereal in her Iron Man PJs. They were looking into a location where the Vulture had taken Spider-Man. They'd only been there for a moment, but there was apparently something interesting in there all the same.

It would have been a lot more exciting if Kamala wasn't essentially stuck in a pocket, breathing the smell of sweat and gunpowder. There was gonna be lint in her hair until the end of time.

Natasha stopped, rather abruptly, and her fingers dipped into the pouch. Kamala clung to her index finger like a koala, and was lifted out. She re-adjusted to normal size, and surveyed their situation, grateful to breathe comparatively fresh air. Black Widow was great, but her belt pockets, not so much.

They were standing in front of a small cabin. It looked too symmetrical, like it was made out of Lincoln logs. There was no glass in the windows, and only the rusty remains of a screen door clinging to the doorframe. Dead leaves were drifting lazily across the floor, catching in the corners and against the doorframe.

"There's a trapdoor in the middle of the floor," Natasha explained. "It's locked from the inside. There's also a coal cellar, with bulkhead doors around the back. There's a hole about three inches wide near the corner. Go through it and open the trapdoor from the inside."

Kamala nodded, foregoing the adoring word-vomit on the tip of her tongue. There wasn't time for that.

The Vulture had started targeting civilians. Not in the sense of individual attacks, like he'd done to her or Spider-Man. Robberies, vandalism, that sort of thing. Mostly on technology-based businesses, with no discernable pattern. The internet was going insane over it.

The hole she had to squeeze through was about three inches in diameter all the way down, but it went through a solid half-foot of metal. Maybe the original owners of the cabin had been designing for some sort of storm shelter, but Kamala doubted that. There was a much higher chance that the Vulture— or someone connected to him— had something to protect.

The basement was dark. Extremely dark. It smelled of mildew and something metallic. Kamala's heart pounded. She was still small enough that nothing would see her, but she couldn't see anything else, either.

From her position on the dusty floor, she took a tentative step forwards— and walked face-first into something cold and rounded. Rusty metal, by the feel. She grew back to her normal size, to step over the object.

In hindsight, bigger was not always better, and she stepped in a bear trap.

She didn't realise it was a bear trap until something sank under her foot and her ankle exploded. Or, it felt like it did. Kamala made a very undignified squeaking noise, and decided to stay put. She stretched an arm up, found the ceiling, and dragged her hand along it until she felt the edge of the trapdoor. When she'd located the edge, she relaxed back to her natural height.

Now came the real challenge.

She trailed noodle-long fingers across the surface until she encountered a dangling padlock and inserted one. Natasha had talked her through the process, but it still took her a shamefully long time to locate and manipulate the tumblers to the point where she could turn it, which hurt a little. When she pushed the trapdoor open, Natasha's head appeared silhouetted in the sunlight.

"You're gonna hate me," Natasha said. "How much do you weigh? Right now?"

"Uhhh… A hundred and twenty pounds? At most?" Kamala shrugged. She'd sound really stupid if she admitted to the bear trap, so she tried to subtly shapeshift out of it by making her leg utterly tiny. She managed to get her leg free, then decided that having a tiny foot was much better than trying to find a safe place to plant it.

"Right," Natasha said. "There's a lightswitch next to the door you came through. I'd advise you to turn the lights on. Then you're going to need to shapeshift smaller."

Kamala reached out, fumbled for the light switch and flicked it on. A series of recessed lights lit up the ceiling.

Her free foot was in less than a foot square of actual flooring. The rest was a checkerboard of pressure plates and glinting metal things , which looked like a cross between clockwork, torture paraphernalia and the odd kitchen gadgets that were advertised on tv at two in the morning. Kamala had a brief and horrible mental image of falling over and being turned into endless curling noodles, like a zucchini in a veggetti.

"Wow," she said.

"Wow indeed," Natasha answered. "I'm going to need you to be very light or have a very long reach, and type exactly what I say ."

"I can do that!" Kamala said, perhaps a little over-enthusiastic. She reached her hands over to the desktop computer sitting on one of the workbenches. It was standard Stark-tech; she recognised every inch of it.

Natasha walked her through the process of disarming the traps. When she'd entered the final code, there was a loud whirring sound, and they all dropped jerkily to the level of her foot. Clunking, tiles jutted from a gap around the bottom of the walls, and juddered out to reach the edges of Kamala's square of safety. She allowed the other foot to return to normal size, healing the bear trap wounds in the process.

Black Widow swung down through the trapdoor, and handed Kamala what looked like a compact camera.

"Inventory," she said. She'd demonstrated how to use the camera before, briefly— almost like a normal one, if it was set on long exposure. Multiple angles, every time.

Kamala felt like this was maybe the biggest responsibility of her life, because Black Widow seemed to do that to people. Around her, everything seemed exponentially more important. And exponentially more awesome.

Kamala obediently started taking photos. To her delight, the camera captured holograms— each slow click of the shutter revealed the internal components of her subject. Iron man would probably put them together into complete images later.

The benches around the edge of the room— bolted to the walls, suspended above the traps— were crowded with technology. Mostly weaponry. There were lots of guns, in various sizes and numbers of barrels. One had a cluster of tiny holes on the front, which didn't seem practical whatsoever.

Black Widow was digging through the computer's files, pulling up and sorting through blueprints. What Kamala could see on the screen looked pretty interesting, but she had a job to do and Black Widow probably wouldn't appreciate her getting distracted.

Kamala moved systematically around the room, starting in one corner and working around the perimeter. There was massive variation in technology, but it all followed one common theme. Weaponry. Guns on the walls, grenades in boxes on benches.

The dominant aesthetic seemed...alien. that strange, bronzeish metal that made up the Vulture's wings, and the telltale seamless look of weapons that didn't use bullets. All of it was very, very cool, but also very concerning. There were entire armies out there with less weapons than this single small-ish room, and Kamala couldn't help but wonder what it was for.

One table held a macabre cluster of fake hands, like the mannequins at a jewelry store. It was an odd combination, delicate black velvet on bulky battle tech. It didn't bother her until she spotted them— bracelets. Thick, gold bangles, fused at the edges. Outwardly identical to the set on her left wrist.

Kamala felt slightly sick.

She raised the camera. The image took a second to form completely in the viewfinder, but once it did, she could make out the compartments inside. The metal was thinner than hers, a different alloy. It felt like an insult, somehow. The original was important , and she couldn't expect the Vulture to know about her family heirlooms, but looking at this cheap imitation made her skin crawl.

On the hand a few rows back, Kamala could see a perfect imitation of Spider-Man's webshooters. One had been opened to reveal the mechanism inside, as if it was on display.

"Black Widow?" she said. Natasha turned to look at her, and she picked up the hands with the webshooters, presented them.

Black Widow didn't look alarmed. Probably because she'd seen far more alarming things in her life.

"Huh," She said, walking over. "That doesn't look good."

She pried the complete device off its hand, and slid it over her own. It was oversized on her wrist, to the point where she could fit a finger between the plastic and her arm. The trigger, which should have been in her palm, landed at the base of her fingers.

"Ms. Marvel," she said. "Film this."

Kamala raised the camera, and fiddled hopelessly with the buttons for a second before she found the video mode.

Natasha pressed the trigger with two fingers, and a jet of white webbing sprayed forth and stuck to the wall.

Off the top of her head, Kamala could think of two people with access to this tech. Spider-Man, and maybe Iron Man, in that he was the tech guy for all of the Avengers and that probably included Spider-Man. If Vulture had got his hands on it… how? Nobody could hack anything of Tony Stark's, and Spider-Man was second only to Black Widow in keeping secrets from the public.

Natasha tugged the line, first gently, then harder. On the second yank, it snapped.

"They don't have the formula," Kamala said, before she had the time to realise she was stating the obvious. "Spidey's has at least the tensile strength of actual silk."

She'd done the maths, mostly for an argument on , and as useful as that had been at the time, right now it was probably just making her look like a nerd.

"Have you imaged everything?" Black Widow asked. She spooled the trailing webbing around a gloved finger, regarded it with disgust. "I'm done here."

Kamala took a few minutes to finish taking pictures. There was a massive collection of stolen tech. Failed versions of the webshooters, and, more worryingly, weapons she'd seen in the iron man armour. No repulsors yet, but several prototypes, mostly deconstructed on the workbenches with labels scribbled down right on the surface, as if the person working on them was too frustrated to find paper. Whoever'd done this had approximated Black Widow's electro-darts too, but their version was a lot bulkier and a lot less refined. They were working towards it from scratch, rather than imitating.

They bagged some of the technology, for physical evidence. Kamala got the webshooters, some of the Iron Man stuff, and the ugly gigantic Widow's Bite knockoffs. Natasha took guns, and a gauntlet vaguely reminiscent of War Machine's. She hauled herself back up through the trapdoor, and Kamala followed.

"This is bad, isn't it," Kamala said, as she thread her fingers through a crack in the floor to reach the lock. They weren't leaving the place as they'd found it, but the lock would give them some measure of time.

"Not as bad as it could have been," Black Widow said. She stepped effortlessly down from the cabin, leaves crunching under her feet. "I figured they'd be hoarding superpowered teenagers down there."

"There was an evil bird guy hoarding teenagers in my home state, once," Kamla babbled. "But not super powered ones. Just normal teenagers. As power sources for his machines. It was really messed up, actually. I'm glad this one doesn't do that. But— why did he go after me, then?"

The corners of Black Widow's mouth quirked up slightly, which was probably her analogue to hysterical laughter. She seemed a lot more expressive around Kamala than she did on TV.

"To spite us, probably," she said. "Tony's paranoid about Spider-Man and everyone knows it. Someone probably drew a line back to you, and picked you out as a target."

"Oh." Kamala found that a little bit insulting, but she could understand the thinking behind it. She was young and small and street-level, and female. If she were an evil bird guy, she'd go after someone like her, too. "Where are we going?"

She was pretty sure that Black Widow was going back to whatever it was the Avengers did when aliens weren't invading, and she was going to be sent back home somehow . She kind of needed to be. As ridiculously cool as the Avengers were, and as much as she wanted to hang out with them forever, she had school tomorrow.

Natasha looked at her like she was stupid.

"To the compound," she said. "We need to tell Tony about this."

"I'm allowed there?" Kamala could feel herself gawking, but that was maybe the maximum amount of dignity she could muster. Proper expression of her emotions would have probably included screeching and fistpumping and possibly actual jumping for joy.

"In parts of it, yes," Black Widow said. "You don't have actual clearance, but you're not going to be able to infiltrate the place based on five minutes in our living room."

Under any other circumstances, this would have been the best day of Kamala's life. Now, with stolen technology in her backpack and what felt like less information than she'd started with, she wasn't so sure.


	9. Chapter 9

Tony'd gone back to get the evil backpack. Once he made sure it wasn't going to explode, or broadcast its location, or anything else irritating, he set about his next two tasks: finding Peter, and feeling sorry for himself.

The main issue here, he decided, was a lack of communication. Peter didn't talk about this sort of thing. Getting the kid to admit that he even had emotional needs in the first place was like pulling teeth, if the aforementioned teeth were rooted in concrete, sealed with epoxy resin, and had to be coaxed out with tweezers. His distress only really showed in the moments when it boiled over.

Why did he have to be such a goddamn _handful_?

Was this just a downside of responsibility that he'd never seen before?

Peter had made it to his apartment, and either ditched the trackers (unlikely) or been stopped (less unlikely).

When he'd gotten this dealt with, Tony was going to apologise to Rhode for everything he'd done before the age of 30. And most of the things he'd done after the age of 30. And maybe send Pepper a fruit basket.

The parking lot outside Peter's apartment block had people in it, which was unfortunate. Tony didn't look put-together enough to be recognised, which was less unfortunate. He'd never fly in anything less comfortable than sweatpants, and that tended to conflict with his public image.

There was grime around the corners of each button on the intercom. The name 'Parker'—in black block caps, contrasting the sun-faded writing on the other labels—was almost obscured by dust that had gathered on the inside of its plastic covering.

May buzzed him up the minute she heard his voice, and opened the door for him when he got there.

May looked rather put-upon, but still surprisingly composed. She was somehow slightly intimidating in polkadot pajamas, with her hair in two messy braids. She was holding a cup—more of a tankard, really—of black coffee, and looked utterly unimpressed.

"Come in," she said. "There's coffee if you want any."

"Sure," Tony said, because he'd spent eight hours in the air and another five chasing an idiot child, and killing for caffeine suddenly didn't seem so irrational. He stepped inside.

Peter was there, asleep on the couch in the clothes he'd left in, minus the grungy socks. He was cocooned in the striped comforter from his bed, horribly pale against the colours. A bluish bruise was forming near his eye.

May led Tony to the kitchenette and poured him lukewarm coffee from a half-full pot. The kitchen didn't have a complete wall. It was designed to create the illusion of space where there was none, and failed dramatically.

"So," she said. "He's back. He really shouldn't be back."

Her fingers drummed against her mug. Someone upstairs ran across the ceiling.

"Why is he here?" she asked, her voice low and tense, almost accusatory. "What did you do ?"

"Nothing that I know of." Tony took a sip of his coffee, and almost wished he'd declined it. "He came back here to go after the bird guy's tech, actually. Why, what did he tell you?"

It wouldn't have been a totally stupid plan, if plans existed in a vacuum. Because they didn't, it was one of the most irritatingly idiotic things he'd ever done.

"That you were being unfair," May answered. "Paranoid."

Something tight in Tony's chest relaxed. If that was all…

"That's…" May was just about the only person in the world Tony couldn't talk to easily. "Not really abnormal, for people like us. Don't worry about it."

May scoffed in an incredibly Peter-ish manner.

"I'm going to worry," she said. "Nothing can be done about that. I'm sorry Peter is giving you so much trouble, though. I swear, he's usually smarter than this."

Tony had to introduce her to Natasha, sometime. Any reasonable spy would kill for the ability both Parkers had — they could deliver a precise and effective guilt trip with just a few words, like Black Widow could knock someone unconscious with a couple blows to the right pressure points.

Peter wouldn't have done this if he trusted them. Not all alone.

"It's okay," he said. "This is far from the most annoying thing my teammates have done. It's far from the most annoying thing I've done."

May hmmed in agreement, then grew more serious.

"As I understand it," she said, leaning against the counter. "If Peter had gotten whatever sort of medical clearance you use, then this wouldn't be an issue? He could come back home?"

Tony nodded, sipped his coffee. The design on the mug was chipped in places, but it had started out as his faceplate. He was pretty sure it was one of the earlier pieces of merchandise, after the keychains but before the plush toys and pajamas.

At once, the logic clicked.

"He probably didn't think he'd make it," he said.

"That's not good," May said, under her breath. She made abrupt and interrogatory eye contact. "I just find it concerning that he felt like he had to get away from you. Especially _now_. "

She meandered through the open-plan space to the living room, slotted neatly into the area of sofa between Peter's head and the armrest. Tony took one of the mismatched armchairs. May was giving him the same subtly untrusting look that he got when he suggested projects involving plastic explosives or international travel. She was probably— rightfully— still a little wary from the whole Germany thing.

"So do I," Tony admitted. Peter wasn't supposed to be like this. "This is… worrying."

Peter displaced his frustration but he still expressed it, most of the time. And crucially, he wasn't totally isolationist. He didn't know how to be. If he did, that was new.

May reached for Peter's shoulder, and gently shook him awake. He blinked a few times before his eyes focused on Tony.

"Oh no, " he mumbled, shifting into a sitting position. The action made him wince. "Okay- I can explain."

There were corduroy lines on his cheek, mirroring the pattern of the sofa. He looked oddly haggard, his cheekbones sharper and his eyes dark.

"I made a mistake," he said. "And I'm sorry. Really sorry. I thought-"

His voice cracked on the word, almost imperceptibly shaking. May put an arm around him. Everything about his body language was small , his hands hanging between his knees, shoulders drawing inwards.

"I thought maybe I could start helping people again," he said. "'Cause–it's been too long. I can't just... stop . That's – that isn't okay."

The words were like a roundhouse kick to the heartstrings. That was not a pretty pattern of thought.

"Oh, Petey," May said, rearranging her body to make eye contact. "Sometimes you need breaks. This is one of those times. It's not your fault."

The atmosphere shifted, sharply. All of a sudden, Tony was intruding on a sort of intimacy he had little experience with.

"But–usually-" Peter protested.

"Usually you're healing faster," May cut in. "Usually you're stronger than you are right now. You can be Spider-Man when you get better."

Peter sniffled, wiped his nose on his sleeve.

"That's– I recognise that, now," he said, his eyes darting from May to Tony and back. "I was being stupid. The–the past tense is kinda key there. And I'm sorry for that, and for making you come out here and wasting your time. But...if I promise to stay at home and sleep a bunch and not do anything, please can I stay here?"

The little speech was almost overwhelmingly pathetic, and probably not entirely genuine.

"If medical says you can, you can," Tony said. He shrugged, trying to seem calm about the situation. "New York can handle a couple weeks without you. You're not that big a deal yet."

"If he's staying with you any longer, I want to visit," May said. Peter visibly relaxed, and Tony wondered just how much of that demand was for her benefit.

"I could probably get you cleared for medical," Tony suggested. If that wasn't an option already, he'd make it one. "There's not really a precedent for this sort of thing. Most of us don't really have people to come visit in the first place."

Chances were, Peter was better off than he thought he was, and she wouldn't have to. And if she did, she was his next of kin. There'd be loopholes.

"Good," May nodded, curt and proper, then pulled Peter into a hug. He returned the gesture, mumbled something quiet that made her smile. It had been a long time since Tony had that sort of contact with someone; he suddenly craved it.

Peter was almost distressingly co-operative, after that. May brought him gatorade and toast, then went about getting ready for work, composed as always in the face of superhuman nonsense. Tony watched, slightly bored, as Peter made eating two slices of toast into a painful, Sisyphean affair, taking ever smaller bites and scraping the jam off on the rim of his plate.

"Are you concussed?" Tony asked. Peter looked baffled. "You're never this quiet unless you have a brain injury."

"Nah," Peter said. "I didn't sleep. I'm tired ."

It was difficult not to examine him, all the same. Peter seemed to be getting exponentially worse with time. The circles under his eyes were starting to look inked there. He'd developed an odd, washed-out look, a consequence of his total inability to deal with convalescence like a reasonable human being.

After Peter had finished his toast and spent half an hour digging shoes and sweatshirts out of the mess that was his room, they left with minimal fuss. A lot of hugs on May's part, but no whining. Mostly because Peter was too tired to protest. He made it out to the car, buckled in, and was asleep before they were back in traffic.

Thank god that was over.

It wasn't easy to deal with this sort of thing. Tony wasn't nurturing , by any definition of the word. Fitting him into a caring role was like fitting a square peg into a round technically possible, it was damaging to both involved parties, and usually required the use of a hammer.

He was trying . Really, really trying. But he didn't have a script for this, and nothing ever seemed to go smoothly. There was always some conflict that came completely out of left field.

Tony turned the radio on, at a low volume. Peter didn't stir, so he allowed himself a very quiet jam session to pass the time, mouthing along to 'Highway to Hell' as the stress began to leave his body. He couldn't really drive the message home of how dangerous this day had been, but Peter'd probably gleaned that from the consequences alone. The worst of it was over.

At least, it seemed that way until Peter woke up.

"Tony," he mumbled. He drew a sharp, shaky breath. "Tony?"

"Yeah?" Tony said. That sounded a little like the run-up to crying, which was utterly outside of his wheelhouse. Crying was pretty much the worst case scenario.

"I don't–" Peter just managed to get the words out before he gagged. He made the mistake of putting a hand over his mouth. Watery vomit spurted between his fingers, through his nose. It was a sudden, violent action; the retching seemed to dominate his entire body. He was bringing up something strange—thin, whitish plaques that caught in the viscous strands of bile and mucous that trailed from his mouth to his cupped hand.

'Shot Down In Flames' was playing, underlying the sound of retching.

"Jesus Christ !" Tony swore, swerving onto the shoulder. Because of course, a rescue mission in the wee hours of the morning wasn't enough. He had to clean puke out of his favourite Audi, too.

"I'm sorry," Peter gasped, between heaves. He'd curled forwards, his free hand pressed to his abdomen, where the surgical wound was. "I–your car ."

"It's not a big deal," Tony said, once Peter had definitely stopped hurling into the footwell. He wanted to slam his head against the steering wheel. If he'd been at all prepared to deal with this sort of thing, he would have gotten a baby. "I'd be more worried about Bruce's hoodie. I don't turn into a giant green rage monster when I'm angry."

Peter stayed hunched over, staring into the puddle of vomit at his feet like he was trying to see the future in it.

"Blood?" Tony asked.

"No, no…" Peter coughed thickly, squeezed his eyes shut. "I–I'm good. Not good but...not throwing up blood. I'm really, really sorry."

"There's cleaning stuff in the trunk, it's fine," Tony said, cursing internally. "How about you just–go be outside for a moment?"

"Just...gimme a second," Peter mumbled. "That–that really hurt . I, I can...just…get me, like, paper towels. I'll deal with this."

He complied eventually, and spent a few minutes sitting on the ground and sipping water while Tony rolled up his sleeves and wondered when he'd signed up for this. It was difficult not to be a little resentful, even with Peter sitting there looking all tragic. Tragic and really out of it, apparently.

"Hey," Tony said, once the car was usable again. He dropped into a crouch, waved a hand in front of Peter's face. "You coming?"

Peter nodded, then got unsteadily to his feet, still clutching the Voss bottle like a talisman. His fingers were denting the plastic. He'd shed the hoodie and tied it into a ball, isolating the stains on the inside.

"I'm still sorry," he said. And he looked genuinely concerned , which was just ridiculous.

Tony patted his shoulder, which was a mistake, because Peter took it as a cue to fold into his personal bubble. It was more physical support than a hug, but Tony still wasn't particularly comfortable with it. Peter was warm and clammy and leaning heavily enough on him to put them both off balance.

"Kid," Tony prised himself out of the not-hug, feeling sweaty and sticky by proxy. "You have got to get your priorities straight."

"Okay," Peter said. "I'm sorry for being an idiot and having no chill and, just...everything. Do you have tissues or anything? I need to blow my nose."

"Glovebox," Tony said, as he dropped back into the driver's seat. "Did you get carsick, or just...?"

"Basically? You know, like, when you get a cold, and it makes, like, the pressures in your head all weird and you get dizzy?" Peter said, explaining with accompanying hand gestures. "Like that, but…super intense."

"Yikes," Tony muttered. He noted the new downside to superhuman senses. "At least try and aim out the window, next time. I like this car."

It took Peter all of five minutes to fall asleep again. They made it back to the compound without further incident—and not a moment too soon.


	10. Chapter 10

The compound turned out to be exactly as awesome as Kamala expected it to be. The clustered buildings loomed up from the landscape, almost completely concealed until they stepped through the treeline. Kamala and the Black Widow took a flight of shining stairs up to a multipurpose living area, and everyone froze.

The first thing she noticed was the Vision, because he was designed like a six-foot tall, hovering Christmas ornament, had the power of a god, and was currently peeling potatoes. The Hulk (who was not currently the Hulk, but a normal guy who looked like he could be a wacky science teacher) was playing chess and sharing doritos with War Machine at the table, and both of them were staring at her.

"Is Tony back yet?" Black Widow said. "We have...news."

"Nope," The Hulk ate a dorito, then shifted his attention to Kamala. "Who's this?"

"Ms. Marvel," Kamala said, stepping forwards and offering her hand. The Hulk looked at it for a moment, then wiped his dorito-y hand on his jeans and shook hers.

"Nice to meet you," he said.

War Machine shook her hand too, which made her feel like she'd stepped onto a movie set.

"Don't tell Iron Man," Kamala told him. "But I think you're way cooler than him."

" Thank you," War Machine said. He turned back to the Hulk. "See, Tony isn't everyone's favourite."

"Ms. Marvel." Black Widow interjected, crushing the happy atmosphere in an instant.

Kamala scrambled to get the tech out of her backpack, feeling a little bit dumb because of how starstruck she was. Serious business first. Handshakes and autographs later.

She felt a little like she was ruining the mood, hauling the ugly first-draft of War Machine's sonic gauntlet out of her Steven Universe backpack and plonking it on the table. There was a glass wall opposite her- she could see the franticness of her body language in her reflection.

"Someone-" she said, her hands sweating as she dug out another plastic bag. "-Probably the Vulture, is copying your tech."

There was a brief silence, and Kamala wondered if she'd done something wrong.

"Well, that's not good," The Hulk- Bruce Banner- said, finally. "We… will get on that. Do you play chess?"

And that was how Kamala ended up in a chess match with Col. James Rhodes, who was honestly just really nice . That was the most surprising thing about the Avengers, or what was left of them- they were all genuinely pleasant to spend time around, even off the battlefield. Tony Stark made it seem like egotism was part of the whole superhuman thing, but the compound had a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere, especially considering everything that'd happened to them in the past year or so.

The bubble burst, though, when Iron Man got home.

He didn't storm in, per se, but the stress was contagious. He wasn't alone, either. Kamala didn't get a chance to make eye contact with Spider-Man, but she recognised him in the way he moved and the tone in which he whispered oh shit upon seeing her, and she felt pretty terrible about it.

"Don't take it personally," Iron Man said, breezing through the kitchenette and thumbing a button on the coffee machine like he had a personal vendetta against it. "He's cranky because he's not feeling well."

"Why are you cranky, then?" Bruce asked.

"Because kids are awful," Iron Man said. He glanced back to Kamala. "No offense."

Iron Man was forty-six, which was pretty old, in Kamala's opinion. That was almost fifty , older than her parents. People that old had a different perspective. Their definition of kid included people old enough to drink.

"None… taken?" Kamala said. "Uh, your… repulsors…"

"I know, I know, 'Tasha text me," Tony said. He joined them at the table."Now, we have two options. Option one, we go crazy, and chase this lunatic to the ends of the earth because he's good at engineering, or two , we keep calmly keeping an eye on him and wait until either other authorities step in, or he becomes a big enough threat to fall under our jurisdiction."

Accords. Of course.

"He attacked me!" Kamala protested. There was a tangle of thought behind the words- that this was a catastrophe waiting to happen, that anyone with access to Tony's tech was smart enough to be a major threat, that the stupid red tape seemed to be choking the life out of the scraps of team that were left over.

Tony Stark snorted a laugh into his coffee.

"We all get attacked, kiddo," he said. "You're not special."

"Tony," Col. Rhodes' tone was a warning one, and gave Kamala just enough time to pull herself together.

"No, what I mean is," she said. "I won't be the only one. He's not doing this for no reason. There's an agenda here and I think you need to pay more attention to it, before he can actually do whatever he's aiming towards."

"What I mean is, we're already doing that ," Iron Man explained, like she was stupid. "Do you know how many wannabes I've gotten since I made the first suit? God, it must be coming up for fifty, now. Most of them aren't successful, and even if they are, they're not the worst thing in the world. Don't panic."

He wasn't wrong. There'd been others. But this time seemed different.

"Iron Man, with all due respect ," Kamala said, digging her metaphorical heels in. She didn't like being condescended to. "I don't live under a rock. I know about your copy-cats. And they went after you, specifically. None of this… degrees of separation stuff. Attacking Spider-Man makes no sense, and going after me makes, like, negative sense. That just gives you forewarning."

"He's probably just trying to start drama," Black Widow said. She'd obtained a cup of coffee at some point, though Kamala couldn't have said when. "Get Tony off-kilter."

Kamala considered that, for a moment. She couldn't rationalise a plan out of that, but it was very much not her style. She just didn't think like that. And for all of the time she spent reading about it, she didn't know what Iron Man and Spider-Man's dynamic was actually like. Popular consensus was that Spider-Man was one of the many, many secret illegitimate kids that Tony probably had, brought back into the fold after developing superpowers. If that was true...

"That doesn't make him an easier target," Col. Rhodes said. "If anything, he'd be over prepared for the next strike."

"It worked for the last guy," Bruce said, quietly.

The ensuing silence was utterly smothering.

"Ms Marvel," The Vision turned from the onion he was chopping, after what felt like eons. "Are you staying for lunch?"

Kamala blinked.

"Uh, sure?" She didn't have any other plans, but she wasn't sure when this had spiraled from a one-off ride along mission to just 'Kamala and the Avengers hang out'. She didn't really trust the situation.

Was this how they screened people? Over lunch and board games?

A reflection in the glass wall caught her eye. A person behind her. Kamala's mind went scary, strangulation-y places.

"Fuck it," Spider-Man dropped into the chair beside her, maskless and exposed. "Hi."

Kamala couldn't really distinguish between 'bad' pale and 'just naturally super pale' pale, but she was pretty sure nobody should ever look so ashen . Spider-Man slumped forwards with his arms on the table, meaning the mahogany took a significant portion of his weight. He'd changed into sweatpants and a bright red 'Mathletes' shirt with fraying cuffs.

"Uh," Kamala drew a spectacular blank, and fumbled for anything to say in response. "I thought you would be hotter."

"I thought you'd be a nicer person," Spider-Man retaliated. "That's… a common sentiment, really. Mostly 'cause people think I'm older. Like, twenty-five, or something."

"You're not unattractive ," Kamla clarified. Certain, very inaccurate fanart came to mind. "Just. Not what I was expecting? It doesn't matter. Anyway. I'm not taking my mask off."

Domino masks were like glasses, in that the change seemed subtle until you actually saw someone without one of the major fixtures of their face.

"I didn't ask you to?" Spider-Man said. He ran a hand through his damp hair, making it stick up it dark curls. He looked very, very young, maybe even younger than Kamala. "I just- I dunno, we're friends? We text and stuff. Sometimes. And you live in New Jersey? And probably won't rat me out to my evil bird guy?"

"He's an evil bird guy, not your evil bird guy. I fought him too," Kamala protested. "And I wouldn't tell him who you are because I don't like evil bird guys. I had an evil bird guy once, and he sucked . Not like yours, though. Mine was a clone of Thomas Edison and his pet parrot."

Spider-Man was silent for a second. Kamala felt a little guilty for allowing her eyes to jump from detail to detail across his face. A bruise that had just dodged being a black eye. Sparse freckles and scattered pimples. A slight gap in the middle of his left eyebrow, like someone had taken a razor to it then chickened out.

"New Jersey sounds really weird ," he said. He stifled a cough. "Whatever. Mi evil bird guy es tu evil bird guy, I guess."

Kamala wondered if he understood just how many brunet, brown-eyed white boys there were in New York. He wouldn't stand out at all without the costume.

"He copied the webshooters," Tony Stark said. "The evil bird guy, that is."

Spider-Man sighed, and laid his head in his arms. Bruce said something to Col. Rhodes, too soft for Kamala to hear.

"I'm- I'm not dealing with that today," Spider-Man said. "Just- not right now. I'm too tired ."

Kamala prodded his shoulder.

"Are you still drugged?" she asked.

"Nope," Spider-Man tilted his head to the side, looked at her with one brown eye. There was an opaque ring around the iris, like coloured contacts sometimes had. "I'm just having a really bad day ."

"Through no fault of your own, of course," Tony Stark rolled his eyes, oozing sarcasm.

"I said sorry," Spider-Man mumbled, before turning his attention back to Kamala. "So, Ms. Marvel. You gotta tell me who made your suit, 'cause it is awesome ."

"I did?" Kamala said. "Well, my friend helped, actually. We, like, collaborated."

Spider-Man sat up and made actual, enthralled eye contact for the first time in their conversation. His hair was squished on one side, flat against his head. Across the table from them, Tony Stark raised an eyebrow.

" Dude ," Spider-Man breathed, sounding impressed. And like he was starting to lose his voice, but mostly impressed. "That's so cool. I had a homemade suit, but Tony didn't like it so he gave me- like, a better version that's all sleek and technological and stuff."

"Like a makeover. Like in princess diaries?" Kamala asked.

"Like in princess diaries," Spider-Man agreed. "But...less-"

He broke off into a fit of harsh, dry coughing, shielding his face with the crook of his elbow. Kamala winced. The adults at the table shared a look of concern.

The whole situation made Kamala feel awkward, like she was stranded with a group of friends where everyone was already close. Which, really, she was.

"Less princessy," Spider-Man concluded, once he'd got his breath back. "Than princess diaries. It was way more badass."

"Are you saying that Mia Thermopolis isn't badass?" Kamala asked, faux-offended.

"Why have you seen princess diaries?" Tony asked.

"You don't think it's weird that I've got spider powers, but you think it's weird that I've seen princess diaries?" Spider-Man said. He shrugged. "One of the kids I babysit doesn't watch anything princess in princess diaries is, like… you know what happened to Captain America? That but with more dresses. But she's still pretty badass. It's not a bad movie."

"But, evil bird guy," Kamala said, snapping back to subject with the beautiful knowledge that Spider-Man had seen and enjoyed princess diaries in her heart. "Are we just… waiting and watching on the evil bird guy?"

"All in favour of watching and waiting on the evil bird guy?" Col. Rhodes said. There was a chorus of ayes.

Kamala frowned.

"I think we should, like, crowdsource it," Spider-Man said. "Like, we could- could, uh, would Friday do data aggregation? I mean, it worked for me, but it took forever and it sucked ."

"Oh, I have a program that… sort of does that," Kamala said, then realised how much she'd fucked up. "I don't use it for, uh, tracking evil bird guys, but I could tweak it if you want."

Technically, she used it to phase out the squicky genres and tropes and select the good ones, across her six favourite fansites. The system it was based on could easily be modified to probe through everything surrounding the tweets and videos, and rule out everything that was actually about birds. And Black Widow would never have to know that half of the internet thought she was Spider-Man's mom.

"I've been working on something like that, actually," Spider-Man said. "Or, like, trying. I'm still super tired from almost getting disemboweled."

"How's that going for you, by the way?" Kamala asked. "Are you healing any better?"

"Not really," Spider-Man said, looking slightly uncomfortable. "Do you like board games? We have like a billion, for some reason."

"Sure, I guess?" Kamala said. Nobody had moved the Vulture's tech; the individual pieces were still piled in the middle of the table, a squat, imposing heap.

Kamala wanted to relax. To calm down and kick Spider-Man's ass in Settlers of Catan, and eat robot-made vegetable soup that he would have no part in. But she couldn't shake the feeling of a looming threat. It was there at the back of her mind, digging in like a rock in her shoe. She was slowly being consumed by the desire to do something , even if the only result was her own reassurance.

If the Avengers weren't going to investigate, Kamala would do it herself.


	11. Chapter 11

It was well into the afternoon, and Kamala was still at the compound. She'd planned on leaving hours ago, but Tony Stark had clapped his hands and commanded everyone's attention, and herded them all down to his workshop.

It'd been like walking into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, except instead of candy and chocolate, the room was full of gleaming tech and flickering holograms. It looked like a place where magic happened. There were little traces of humanity, though, scattered notebooks and tools, an overstuffed couch heaped with blankets, a few abandoned coffee cups that were starting their own ecosystems. Every now and then, Kamala would look up from her work and suppress a squeal of joy at just being there .

Tony had hooked up a laptop to the camera, and sent the images to tablets, which then projected holograms. He'd doled out toolkits and assigned everyone a workspace. The rest was up to of the remaining Avengers drifted in and out of the shop, but Kamala hadn't moved from her seat in a couple hours. The technology was fascinating, and it was a privilege to work with these people.

Col. Rhodes was making another round of coffee. Tony was darting around the room starting automatic processes and taking readings. Black Widow had left a couple hours ago, and was just now returning with- donuts?

Kamala heaped another set of tiny screws into a falcon tube, scrawling the corresponding photo's ID number on the label in sharpie. She missed Spider-Man. He'd served as something of a buffer between her and the other, older superheroes, but he'd conked out after one game of Catan and been shooed off to actually rest.

"So," Tony Stark said, leaning on Kamala's workbench. His skin looked better on TV; she wondered just how much makeup he wore. "Tell me more about your textiles."

"Um," Kamala said. "What do you mean, 'more'? 'Cause, uh, there's not really much to add...?"

"Well, there's a lot of potential in the concept, for a start," Tony said. "Are you planning on expanding development to other areas, or limiting the use to just your suit?"

"Tony," Col. Rhodes said, drifting over with a donut in hand. "No. She lives in a different state."

"Hey, hey," Tony said. "I'm just talking to her ."

"Um," Kamala said, frozen with her screwdriver held aloft. The idea of Tony Stark taking actual interest in something her and Bruno had made in a week was both insane and exhilarating.

"He's going to throw money at you until he feels better about Spider-Man," Black Widow said, apparating behind Kamala and pushing the donut box into the middle of the table. "I'd advise you to make puppy eyes at him and milk this for all it's worth."

"Nat, just 'cause you're obsessed with atonement," Tony said, fingers inching towards the box,"Doesn't mean everyone is. Maybe I'm just investing in the future of our organisation, huh? Ever consider that?"

"I love you too, Stark." Black Widow snatched the caramel donut Tony had been reaching for, and then both she and Tony whipped their heads around to find the source of the sudden commotion at the back of the shop. Kamala followed their gaze.

"Hi?" Spider-Man waved from the staircase, propping up the stack of boxes he'd nearly knocked over with one hand."...why is everyone staring at me?"

He was pulled into the lab-o-sphere and nudged towards his workbench, but almost immediately he moved his work to the couch, picking apart the weak imitation of his webshooters. Kamala grabbed a metal tray from the shelving under the bench, took two donuts from the box, and joined him.

They needed to talk. He was the most likely person to throw bureaucracy to the wind and work with her.

"Hey," Kamala said, offering one of the were both chocolate-frosted, so neither of them would lose out. "Wanna help me find out what the Vulture's deal is?

Spider-Man grinned like she'd just invited him to Disneyland. He took the donut, and promptly abandoned it on the armrest of the couch.

"Absolutely," he said. "But not here. There's cameras."

Kamala spent what felt like only minutes with her eyes trained on the failed iron man gauntlet she was disassembling. She put her earbuds in, and didn't look up until Spider-Man pulled one out.

"Pasta," he said, laconically.

Kamala trailed upstairs after him, and was served blessedly anchovy-free pasta puttanesca. To her surprise, it was dark outside. She sent a text to her mother, assuring her that she hadn't been kidnapped by supervillains, and was in fact eating spaghetti with the good guys. Her mom answered with a request for War Machine's autograph.

"So," Spider-Man said. He'd taken the seat next to her, but seemed more concerned with cutting his pasta into smaller and smaller pieces than actually eating it. "When do you have to be home?"

The implication was clear.

"Theoretically, Monday," she said. "For school. Could I maybe just…stay?"

"Tony," Spider-Man said, almost begging. "Can she stay? Just overnight, please ? Friday, back me up here."

The accented voice in the ceiling ran through a list of studies, which must have pointed to the benefits of sleepovers somehow, because Tony Stark surrendered.

"Sure," he said, not looking up from his phone. "But no co-ed bunking. And provided you stop dissecting that pasta and actually eat some of it."

Spider-Man took a very vindictive mouthful of pasta. He chewed for a second before his eyes went wide.

"Not like that ," he said, once he'd both swallowed and caught on.

After dinner and a round of rich, gingery truffles that made Kamala feel like she was in one of the fancier districts in the Hunger Games, everyone began to settle in for the evening. They were almost like a family unit, but not quite - a unanimous, nonverbal decision was made to split off into little factions, which left Kamala watching movies with Spider-Man to pass the time before people started going to bed. Popcorn was popped, and The Princess Bride queued up to stream on Tony Stark's gargantuan TV.

"You know," Spider-Man said, sinking into the exorbitantly fancy sofa beside her. "I've never seen this movie?"

" How ?" Kamala said, placing the bowl of popcorn between them. "How do you exist on this earth for, what, eighteen years, and not ever see Princess Bride?"

"Sixteen," Spider-Man said. "I'm sixteen. Well. I will be soon."

"Sixteen years is still way too long to go without having seen The Princess Bride," Kamala said, trying- and failing- to rationalise the fact that Spider-Man was younger than her. God, he was probably a sophomore , and sophomores were babies . "I'm turning seventeen in three months."

"Man," Spider-Man said. He sat with his legs crossed on the couch, and Kamala copied him- her feet didn't quite touch the floor, and she didn't like that. "I'm glad I'm not the only kid around here."

He was oddly quiet throughout the movie. Not to say he was silent, but borderline-manic babbling was one of his defining characteristics, so the subdued, if snarky, commentary he kept up during the movie seemed ridiculously sparse. Kamala had made way too much popcorn, though, which gave her an excuse not to talk.

After Princess Bride, and half of Sky High, the lights began to dim.

"Okay," Spider-Man said. Kamala, who was caught in the so-bad-it's-good drama of teenage superheros with a life she wished she had, and trying to shapeshift her mouth bigger to eat more popcorn at once, blinked owlishly at him for a second before swallowing.

"Midnight?" she suggested. Spider-Man nodded, and they split.

An hour and a half later, Kamala padded into his room, a cardboard tub tucked under her arm. The door was easily identified as his by virtue of an orange post-it note on the door, which simply stated 'return stuff'.

"Spider-Man?" she said quietly, fumbling for the lightswitch and turning the dimmer knob with the tip of her finger. She was definitely in the right place. Nobody else had Captain America pajamas. The little stars were glowing faintly in the dim light,tossed atop a pile of dirty clothes in a laundry basket. "Um. I brought ice cream?"

Spider-Man slept on his front, with the entirety of his face mashed into his pillow like he was trying to smother himself. That made it all the more comical when he popped up to look at her.

"Hey," he rasped, before clearing his throat. "So. Evil bird guy. Did you say ice cream? Did I dream that?"

Kamala held up the the ice cream. Ben and Jerry's - the good stuff - because who didn't like vanilla ice cream filled with giant globs of raw cookie dough?

"You didn't," she said. She sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed, pulled the lid off the ice cream, and handed Spider-Man a spoon. "Right, first we need to compare our information. Are we being watched?"

"Nope," Spider-Man said, sounding almost smug. "I have a rule against sleeping anywhere with audio-visual. It's creepy. Talk away."

"Did you tell Iron Man about your…" Kamala tapped her wrist. Spider-Man shook his head.

"Nah," he said. "He'd kill me. But I did find someone associated with the evil bird guy."

Kamala took a mouthful of ice cream. She didn't know how Iron Man would react, so she couldn't really judge, but Spider-Man's logic there seemed very, very flawed.

"There's someone out there using War Machine's sonic tech," he said, grabbing his tablet from the nightstand and opening a google document. "Tony and I ran into him, and there were a couple more sightings before that. And I have a map of evil bird guy sightings, so there's that."

Kamala nodded, frowning as she struggled to dig her spoon into the solid block of frozen deliciousness.

"I got my program, uh, together," she said, jamming her spoon into the too-solid ice cream to keep it in place and turning on her own phone. "It's an app, so I think it should work on your tablet if you want it. Can I see your map?"

The sightings clustered around New York City, because New York City was a hotbed of super-drama. There was one out where she'd been attacked, and a scattered few outside the city limits.

"I've been comparing, like, tweets to, to, google maps and stuff," Spider-Man said. "And- I swear it's smarter than I'm making it sound right now. There was this news report, actually, up in Connecticut, by this, uh, big old house thing? And that sounds interesting."

"What is he doing in Connecticut ?" Kamala muttered. Spider-Man excavated a chunk of cookie dough from the ice cream, looked at it for a few seconds, then put it back, his nose wrinkling in disgust."What's even in Connecticut?"

"Something the Vulture is super into, for some reason," Spider-Man said. "There are a few examples where, um people thought he was mothman? But they took pictures, so I know it's him."

"Awesome," Kamala said. She tapped her phone screen, then reached over to Spider-Man's, nudging his warm hands out of the way. "I've just been-" she found the right tag, compared their feeds. "-filtering, really. Across seven sites so far. How big a physical area are you looking at, here? All of New York state?"

"Connecticut was new," Spider-Man tilted his head back, winced. When Kamala sent him a concerned look, he shrugged and tried to smile. "Brainfreeze. Ugh. Maybe, um, look more at Connecticut? And see if there's been anything else on your side of the river?"

Kamala decided not to mention the fact that he hadn't actually eaten any ice cream.

They looked more at Connecticut, because nothing was going on in New Jersey. A pattern seemed to emerge- a cluster of sightings around Redding, a small town that really didn't seem like the kind of place an evil bird guy would be interested in. Maybe the Vulture was just really into historic architecture?

Sightings were far from conclusive evidence. But Redding wasn't too far, compared to other places Kamala had traveled on superhero business.

They talked for a while longer, exchanging theories. Kamala could have talked about it for hours, but after the third time Spider-Man dozed off while sitting upright, she sighed and gave up.

"I'm going to bed," she said, standing.

"What? No! I'm... I mean..." Spider-Man's shoulders slumped in defeat. "I was having fun."

Kamala couldn't help but smile. "Me too."

The next morning, after a shower and breakfast, during which an army of brave waffles were mercilessly cut down by a group of ravenous superheroes, Kamala left. If anyone else noticed the fact that Spider-Man didn't take a bite of food, they didn't say anything, and so neither did she. He was her only actual friend in the Avengers, and she didn't want to upset him.

She felt a little more prepared. The Vulture wasn't the kind of thing that people wrote big, showy stories about, so there wasn't much information in reach. But she had Spider-Man on her side now, and they'd made a little progress. Together, they'd get to the bottom of this.

In hindsight, her confidence was misplaced.


	12. Chapter 12

Peter had fallen asleep on a sofa, with a half-finished project in his lap, but he woke up in his bed. He was too hot, tangled in the top sheet and duvet. He wasn't sure what time it was. Since Ms Marvel's visit, he'd been sleeping in random, few-hour chunks and waking up from nightmares. The nightmares hadn't woken him this time, though.

He slowly sat up and watched the paper lampshade sway in the air current from the vents. Something was off, dangerous, a pressing tension in the air, like the moment before Ant-Man had lept off Captain America's shield. But Peter couldn't pinpoint it. There was no sense of directionality, like there was when he was about to be hit. All he could see was the still, dark room.

Then, pain. Ripping through his abdomen like it was being torn open all over again, wrenching him into a protective ball and making his mind go blank. For a moment he was back in the sky again, with blood dripping off his body and into freefall.

It didn't stop, but it ebbed, just enough for him to catch his breath, adjusting for the ache it left behind. His fingernails had left stinging semicircles in his palms. Pain couldn't usually catch him off guard like that. He was thrown through buildings on a regular basis. This shouldn't have even fazed him.

He didn't move. If he moved, it might start again.

Another, weaker cramp seized a cluster of muscles near his shoulder, wrenching at the joint, making it twitch like broken clockwork. Everything already ached, and he really, really didn't need this. He'd been getting worse, but not by much. Not like this.

This was his fault. Karma, somehow. A consequence of how stupid he'd been.

A small part of him was very scared.

The vast majority, though, was preoccupied with the throbbing remains of pain trailing through his shoulder, and the sudden, urgent gut-punch of nausea. Throwing up was maybe one of the most painful things he could do right now. It would be agonising for anyone, after the physical trauma he'd undergone in the past few weeks, but with his enhanced senses it would be unbearable.

It didn't have to be immediate, though. He'd struggled through entire battles with broken bones. He could manage being a little queasy.

When the next set of spasms hit, Peter's mouth flooded with hot saliva, and he utterly failed to manage.

The bathroom floor was freezing, especially through sweat-damp pajamas.

The effort of vomiting made it clear just how much healing he had left to do. They'd sliced right along the middle of his abdomen, for exploration, and he could feel the half-healed incision with a kind of neurotic awareness that shouldn't have been possible. There was a horrible itching pull to it, like the layers of skin and muscle had formed a memory of being pinned open and were trying to snap back.

He'd made the mistake of turning on the bathroom light. Even with the dimmer at its lowest, the light was a burning surge of unnecessary input. Pain lurched through him, like his organs were trying to escape with the sparse contents of his stomach. He hadn't eaten for a few days, and the heaving wasn't worth it- it mostly just hurt.

God, he was going to be in so much trouble.

When the worst of it was over, Peter curled up on the tile and resigned himself to a hellish morning. They'd warned him, that was the thing- he'd been talked through every possible complication, every little thing that could go wrong. And he hadn't listened. Now, every nerve in his body was on fire.

Peter coughed, sending another wave of pain through his abdomen, and bringing up thick, white-flecked phlegm that caught in his throat and almost made him throw up again. Maybe this was just a particularly nasty step in the evolution of whatever infection had been bugging him? Maybe he could rely on painkillers and sleep and nobody would have to know?

It was outright frustrating when the cramping came back, and came back worse, more widespread. It was a struggle to push himself half-upright on a shaking, spasming arm, to force air into his lungs against the will of locked intercostal muscles. Any attempt at deep breathing sent spikes of hot agony crushing into his lungs. Hyperventilating was the easiest option.

It was making him cry. That was the worst part. He probably would have been sobbing if it was easier to breathe, and that was...disappointing. Everyone else on the team could have coped with this.

There was tylenol and a thermometer in the mirrored cabinet above the sink, which seemed impossibly far away.

Peter crossed the distance anyway, dizzy and swaying. He desperately wanted to lean on the sink, but he couldn't trust himself not to crack the porcelain in his grip. He'd been sick and alone before. This wasn't such a big deal. It just felt like one. Because he was tired and stressed and allowing anxiety to get to him.

If he repeated that enough, he might actually start to believe it.

He had to take his temperature twice. The first time, the numbers on the thermometer disappeared before he could parse them. Even on the successful attempt, his hand wouldn't stop shaking; he could barely hold on to the numerals enough to extract meaning.

104.3

He ran hot anyway. Maybe hot enough to excuse that. '104' was dimly imprinted on his memory as bad, but that was before he'd started breaking medical norms.

He wiped his sweaty hands on his shirt, so he wouldn't drop the thermometer. Sweat beaded up again immediately, like condensation on a window.

Tylenol - normal, over-the-counter tylenol that wasn't based on half-doses of drugs engineered for Captain America- was a prodrug. Tylenol was a pain in the ass to take. Coupled with Peter's metabolism, Tylenol was a good painkiller in the same way a firework was a good light source, but it was all he had.

Peter dry-swallowed two pills. It was something of a pointless effort; they came back up, almost whole, less than five minutes later.

Aching and defeated, he slumped against the icy outside of the shower cubicle, and tried to focus on taking deep, slow breaths. Panicking would just make everything worse. He could hear his heartbeat, so fast it was almost buzzing in his ears.

Then, footsteps. Not Natasha's. Natasha's would have been softer.

The light flared on, burning an after-image into Peter's eyes like a camera flash, then dimmed. Bruce was looming in the doorway, and would have been sort of scary, if not for the flannel pajamas.

"Hey," he said. "Friday tells me you're not doing great."

"I'm- I'm conscious," Peter protested, digging his nails into the heels of his hand and trying to seem composed. It was a futile effort. Forming words was hard enough, right now. "N-normally you love it when I'm conscious. You- you've changed , Bruce."

Bruce joined him on the floor.

"Well, this isn't really a normal situation for you," he said."Could you tell me what's going on?"

Vitals. Bruce would go for Peter's pulse, for his wrists, which would just make this shitstorm of a night a million times worse.

"If-if I tell you something I should h-h-have a long time ago," Peter began, wincing as pain gnawed below his navel, sharp and stinging like a stab wound. It was difficult to get his mouth out of the grimace. "Will you be mad at me?"

"No, no, of course not," Bruce soothed, but Bruce wasn't the problem, here. Bruce wasn't the person who could cut him off for this.

Tony was.

Peter rolled up his sleeve, picked at the dressing around his left wrist with a trembling hand. The bandages tore and the dressing came away, but so did a layer of skin. The edges of the wound stung, but the rest was glistening, bumpy pink, utterly devoid of sensation. Its area had spread, the reddened skin around it reaching almost to his palm. He was much more careful with the other dressing.

"Oh," Bruce said. He was an oasis of calm. "I guess I'm taking your carotid pulse, then."

Peter's toes curled, cracking furrows into the ceramic tile. His hands were shaking, the tremor running up to his elbows. The helplessness was crushing; usually if he was in this much pain, someone else was causing it and he could make them stop.

"Everything hurts," he choked. "And I don't know why."

There was a brief, dizzying chunk of time where exhaustion overcame agony, and Peter was as still as this nightmare would allow, too drained to move. Then every muscle went tight, like his body was trying to rip itself apart. He'd been through minute-long electric shocks, before, and they'd been far less painful.

"Bruce," Peter managed, taking a fistful of Bruce's sleeve, in lieu of grabbing his actual arm- weak as he was, he could still hurt Bruce if he wasn't careful. Dignity had become totally irrelevant, now. "Bruce, I- I'm really sorry for what I did, and, please - I don't care if I gotta leave right after just- make this stop. Please."

Bruce almost immediately decided this was something medical needed to deal with. Peter moved to stand, then pain scraped through the bones from his hip to his ankle, and something in his knee audibly tore.

Things got a little hazy, after that. Everything in his mind was crowded out by the primal urge to hurt less.

Medical was a flurry of white lights and probing hands, interspersed with what felt like eons of waiting. The entire place smelled like bleach and nitrile gloves, strong enough to be nauseating. People kept asking questions that Bruce had to answer. The pain was overwhelming; Peter was miles past the point of being able to speak for himself.

The pain seemed to get exponentially worse over time. By the time they'd gotten the information they wanted, and Bruce was allowed to leave, it felt like someone was trying to shred through to his skeleton with a cheese grater. He'd gripped the bedrail in an attempt to push himself upright, and the metal had folded around his fingers like clay. There was nothing to do but wait, and watch his knee swell as blood slowly accumulated in the joint.

His heart rate was pushing 120. His temperature had hit 105. He was completely alone, and his body wasn't built for this.

Never in his life had be been more convinced he was going to die.

There'd been close calls because they all had them; brushes with blood loss and hypothermia, crushed injuries and brain damage. Nothing had ever felt so catastrophic, before, so utterly consumingly terrifying. It was easier when someone was trying to kill him. Attempted murder never hurt this much, either. Something was going to give; more bones or his brain or his racing heart. He wouldn't make it out of this. He couldn't breathe.

Peter couldn't think straight. He couldn't think much at all.

Anaesthesia came as a relief


	13. Chapter 13

Tony wasn't prepared for this.

He was unprepared for most things involving Peter, but this was different. Worse.

Tony wrapped the plasticky strings of his disposable isolation gown around his waist, tied them in front, and tucked the pencil-case sized bag he'd brought under his arm. A brightly coloured poster announced proper contact precautions from a brochure holder on the wall beside Peter's door. He pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves, and tucked them into the elasticated sleeves of the gown. This was the type of PPE usually reserved for contact with the kind of pathogens that their enemies engineered. This might be that bad. They hadn't identified a microbe, yet.

Peter had been watching him through the little window in the door for about five minutes, so Tony didn't bother knocking. This was the first time since yesterday that Peter was both awake and lucid, and he didn't want to miss the chance to talk. Early that morning, Tony had walked into the recovery room and Peter had just about screamed at him to get out- once he'd actually recognised him.

"Hey," Tony said. "How are you feeling?"

Peter blinked vacantly at him for a second. He looked like he'd been through hell; he was pale and sweaty and hooked up about a half dozen monitoring devices. Without someone else's baggy clothes to hide in, it was clear how much weight he'd lost- nearly forty pounds, in just over a fortnight- and Tony felt a stab of guilt just looking at him. It'd seemed bad, but not that bad. Everyone was desensitised to what happened when Peter failed to keep up the constant stream of calories that superpowers required. Or maybe Tony had just been in denial

"...drugged," Peter concluded, fiddling with the wires pinned to his gown. They'd done another laparotomy then poured just about all the analgesics in the world into the kid, so 'drugged' was a valid emotional state at this point. "'n super tired. Why… what are you doing here?"

Tony'd had to bring a chair in- they couldn't have anything cluttering up the room- he set it down at the bedside and sat. He'd come with a plan, but it was looking less and less like he was going to actually manage it.

"What, I can't visit you? You wound me, Parker," he said. Levity, levity was important here. He offered the bag. "I brought you stuff. Nat donated the sunglasses. I can buy you less girly ones if you want."

Peter made a sound that was almost a laugh, and took the bag. He looked absolutely awful, but the fact that he could still smile countered that somewhat. Tony had done his research; the fact that he was even conscious at this point was a victory.

"I, uh…" Peter trailed off, rummaged through the bag and found Nat's sunglasses. The thin gold frames looked extremely breakable in his clumsy grip. He seemed to struggle with the logistics of actually putting them on, but that was still a vast improvement. "Did they tell you...?"

"Yes," Tony said. There'd been paperwork about it. Consulting May for consent, because Peter still needed that. "It didn't sound fun."

Peter had sepsis but they'd caught it blessedly, miraculously early, early enough that it might not get worse than this. Prevailing theory was another perforation; something sustained back in New York that hadn't bothered him much until the infection set in. That sort of thing was supposed to be painful, but Peter had a buffer of enhancement between him and the concept of making sense.

Despite everything else- the surgeries, the wait for cultures to come back, whatever the hell was going on with the wounds on his wrists- he was doing almost ludicrously well.

That made Tony feel a little less guilty about this whole ordeal.

"It's great," Peter mumbled, with all the sarcasm he could manage. "I love it when I almost die then strangers stick needles in me."

"See, this is why we tell people things," Tony said.

It was like flipping a switch.

Peter's face fell, and, if it was possible, he grew even paler. The half-second of stubborn hyperventilation wasn't really an adequate warning- suddenly, he was crying. And Tony had absolutely no idea how to deal with that. For a second he just watched, observing Peter's flushed face and shaking shoulders with the same frozen horror people had observing train wrecks.

"Hey, no," Tony said. Bruce would have had a hand on Peter's shoulder, or something like that; the kind of calming contact that Tony didn't feel quite capable of. "What's wrong? Should I get your nurse?"

"No-" Peter cut himself off with a hiccuping sob. He took off Natasha's sunglasses. "I-I'm just- I'm sorry! Really sorry."

And Tony had been going to lecture him. Jesus Christ.

Tony darted to the sink and grabbed a handful of paper towels. Peter wasn't his kid but he was every bit his responsibility, and this was catastrophic failure.

"Sorry for what?" Tony didn't hand the paper towels over because Peter didn't respond to him offering them. What would Natasha do, here? Or Bruce? Bruce was good with people, good with kids. He wouldn't have panicked like this.

"Everything!" Peter was staring up at him with bright, reddened eyes, like he was begging. "Just- I'm really, really sorry. I'll never- I'm not gonna be so stupid anymore, I promise! Just, just don't..."

"Slow down, slow down. What do you mean?" Tony asked. He wanted to grab Peter and shake him, because, right now, he wasn't communicating and Tony therefore couldn't help.

He probably couldn't have helped anyway. Ideally, he'd consult somebody else, somebody with a better grasp on this sort of thing. Any of his teammates would have been better. Friday probably would have been better, and she wasn't even a real person.

"You're- I-I-I'm in trouble," Peter attempted to dry his eyes on a sleeve he wasn't wearing. He seemed to be putting a great amount of effort into dragging coherent sentences together. "And I- I don't know what, what, you're gonna do, b-b-but-"

Peter fell into a fit of coughing, grabbed for one of the paper towels, and hacked something up into it. Stifled sobbing became wheezing, and the numbers on the clip on his finger began to tick down. Tony scanned the room, like he could read a solution off the blank white walls. His fingers drummed on the plastic rail on the side of Peter's bed.

"Hey, hey, Peter, buddy," Tony finally breached the barrier; laid a gloved hand on Peter's upper arm. Touch was supposed to be grounding, right? Touch might help. It at least gave Tony somewhere to put his hands. "Just- breathe, okay?"

Why hadn't something started beeping, yet? Walking into the high dependency unit, there'd been at least two separate sets of shrill beeps overlapping. The lack of alarms- and the actual qualified people alarms would have brought- seemed unfair, like they'd been abandoned out of spite.

Peter choked on nothing, air hissing between his clenched teeth in endless frantic inhales. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He looked horribly vulnerable, horribly young. It was an ugly, snotty, emasculating affair; Tony felt embarrassed for him.

Tony had talked to kids his age, visiting children's hospitals. This was different. This was harder. This couldn't be fixed with balloons and some bullshit inspirational speech. Balloons and speeches probably hadn't fixed it for any of the other kids, either, but Tony hadn't cared so much, then.

"You-" Peter struggled to get the words out between sobs, growing ever more hysterical. "You're mad at me."

"What?" Tony asked, momentarily baffled. Peter wasn't wrong, but he was either overreacting or had made some leap in logic that Tony'd missed. "No, look. I'm not mad at you. I promise. Okay?"

He was incredibly frustrated, in reality- none of this would have happened if Peter had just listened to people- but that wasn't important right now.

Peter shook his head, like he didn't believe what Tony was telling him. Heaving sobs wracked his entire body, the sound wrenching at something deep inside Tony's chest. A low, keening cry began in Peter's throat, and Tony grit his teeth and tightened his grip on the bedrail to keep himself from turning, running away.

"Peter," Tony said, and he was rewarded with shaky eye contact. "It doesn't even matter if I'm angry or not. The consequences aren't going to be worth crying over. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just- do you know how scary this is for me? I've been watching you get worse and worse for...weeks, now."

There'd been steps leading up to this point, and they'd all seen them. But nobody had acted. There'd been an unanimous assumption of complete self-sufficiency, even in the face of ever-building evidence to the contrary. Admitting that Peter needed support here would mean accepting some uncomfortable realities about the things they allowed to happen to someone who couldn't even legally drive.

No wonder he'd snapped.

Peter clenched his fists, tried to stabilise his breathing. He failed. He seemed to have given up on talking, or lost the ability to do so; he just cried.

"It's not your fault," Tony continued, desperately. "I don't blame you. It's just...worrying. This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. This sort of thing hasn't happened, before. I haven't had practice."

This wasn't working. Nothing was working.

"Please stop crying," Tony begged. "What do I need to do to make you stop crying? Buy you stuff? Jesus, what do kids like… video games? You like video games, right? I'll buy you video games. Literally all of the video games."

Peter managed to steady his breathing, just enough to choke out a coherent sentence.

"Even Grand Theft Auto?"

"Sure!" Tony said. That was progress , at least. "Grand Theft Auto, whatever. I'll let you watch The Exorcist, just... stop."

Peter didn't stop crying, but he slowly stopped sounding like it was killing him, which Tony counted as a win. This felt roughly as sincere as dangling keys in front of a baby's face, but if distraction worked, it was what he was going with.

"I c-can't believe you're b-bribing me," Peter sniffled, in between hiccupping breaths. He looked incredibly offended by the prospect.

"Bribery shmibery, it's a bargain," Tony said, shrugging. There was finally space to interject. "Your end of the deal is to stop crying."

"I'm s-sorry," Peter said, yet again. He was winding down, now, tracing back towards the spacy end of his current, distorted emotional range. "F-for crying at you. That- that's really dickish. I'm not being manipulative on purpose."

Christ, why couldn't he just sit back and enjoy the narcotics like everybody else?

"It's fine," Tony said. "You just… surprised me. Are you… okay now? Are you done?"

Peter nodded, scrubbed at his eyes with one of the paper towels Tony'd brought. He slumped lifelessly against the mountain of pillows he'd somehow acquired, exhausted from the breakdown. He wasn't completely calm yet, but the worst of it seemed to be over- or he'd just tired himself out. Tony wasn't sure.

"Okay," he sighed. "We need to talk. Can you do that without crying more?"

"I...think so?" Peter said. It was not a very reassuring statement. Tony had never seen him cry before, not like that, and he was genuinely scared that it might start up again. "Don't tell anybody, okay?"

"I won't," Tony said. "Why the tears, though? That seemed a little...sudden."

"I was really stupid, and it r-really messed me up," Peter said. He was nervous, chewing at the skin around his nails, still sniffling. "And- you can't afford for people to be stupid. You...might not, um, wanna keep me around. I'm okay on my own, but I like you guys. But. I- I- I'm a liability."

His voice cracked on the final word, still thick from all the weeping.

Where had he gotten that idea?

"Once upon a time in two thousand and ten," Tony said. "When I was new to being Iron Man, and you were... probably eating rocks or something, you were like, what, eight? I still had the arc reactor in my chest. But because it wasn't the finalised version, it used palladium as fuel."

"Isn't palladium like, crazy toxic?" Peter asked. "Don't...It shouldn't go in your body. It kills you ."

"Yup," Tony said. "And it started killing me, shockingly . I didn't tell anyone. Nobody knew until Rhodey noticed."

"I don't...get it." Peter squinted at him.

"Point is, it would be very hypocritical of me to- fire isn't the right word- exclude you for this," Tony said. "Because I've been just as stupid. I'm not going to say there won't be consequences, but it's not that big a deal."

Peter closed his eyes, momentarily.

"It feels like a big deal," he said, quietly. "Like, the biggest deal ever."

All at once, it clicked. This logic hadn't come out of nowhere. It was just a matter of scale . Tony had a hazy memory of being roughly fifteen, when everything had felt like the apocalypse. There was a sense of all-encompassing calamity that required emotions that were inaccessible to anyone over the age of twenty-five. Mountains would be made from molehills, at this point.

"I know," Tony said. "But you'd have to do something much worse to get kicked off the team for realsies."

"Like Steve…" Peter mumbled. He was still squinting. Tony wondered if he'd put two and two together and work out that the lights were hurting his eyes. "They're- they put, um, like, screws in my leg, did I tell you?"

"No?"

In response, Peter tugged his blanket aside, revealing a clunky, black, range of motion brace, and a mass of bruising blossoming out from a dressing just below his knee. The staff had mentioned a 'tibial tubercle avulsion fracture', but Tony hadn't actually translated that into the physical reality of Peter's body.

"That is barbarically ugly ," Tony said. He poked the brace with one finger, wrinkled his nose at the feel of the straps. "Jesus, are they prescribing bloodletting, too?"

Peter huffed a laugh.

"I'm kinda disappointed it doesn't light up but I..." he said, before losing his train of thought mid sentence. He put Nat's sunglasses back on, the blue lenses hiding how bloodshot his eyes were. "Can... you gotta tell May that I'm gonna be okay."

"Already done," Tony reminded him. He was gonna redesign the hell out of that brace, dear lord. With the sling they'd used for Peter's collarbone, he'd avoided touching it just because he'd assumed Peter would be out of it too fast for the ugliness to matter.

"Oh," Peter mumbled. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair. " Am I going to be okay?"

"Sure," Tony said, because he didn't know what else to do besides stating the facts. This was a long stay in medical and some physio at worse. The recovery time wouldn't be pretty, but he'd be alright at the end of it. "They'll take care of you here. You'll be fine."

At the time, it seemed like the truth.


	14. Chapter 14

Kamala had taken the train to Connecticut because, annoyingly, Lockjaw had run off to go hang out with...someone. Possibly his giant magic dog friends, though she wasn't actually sure he had those.

She was on this pilgrimage because her program, C.A.R.R.I.O.N, had turned up something really interesting. Carrion, in this case, stood for 'Catch And Record Relevant Information Or News', and she was really proud of the acronym. What it had caught was a series of blurry but utterly awe-inspiring videos of the Vulture, landing on the tiled roof of a colonial-style house in Redding, Connecticut. He'd popped the wings down and hopped off the roof like it was nothing, then the camera lost him, every time.

Maybe going all the way to Connecticut was a bit of an overreaction, but Kamala didn't really have any other options. She'd been getting total radio silence from Spider-Man, which was both extremely worrying and extremely annoying, and it wasn't like she knew anyone in Connecticut who could look for her.

Spider-Man was in the best hands possible. He was going to be okay.

Kamala squinted at her phone. She wasn't in costume, because Ms. Marvel going to Connecticut was a much bigger deal than some random highschooler going to Connecticut, and she was trying not to tip people off. Google Maps was her guide and saviour, right now.

The train ground to a noisy stop in Redding. After the stupidly long and complicated journey, Kamala really wanted to seek out the nearest fast food place and eat as many fries as she could legally obtain at once, but she had places to be. She passed a newspaper stand - which she hadn't realised were still a thing - and glanced her own costume on the front of a magazine.

She looked up from Google Maps. Her name was in the headline. She'd been linked to Spider-Man's disappearance, as had pretty much everyone else. She'd seen a masterpost of theories on a blog - her current favourite was the that Tony Stark had paid to have Spider-Man kidnapped to Siberia, because Iron Man was being overshadowed in the media. Some people just couldn't seem to buy that an injury had temporarily pulled someone out of the most dangerous career in the world.

The address hadn't been difficult to work out, mostly because there was nothing in Redding. It was the kind of place that certain people called 'scenic', and Kamala, as a person who lived in a city, called a building-dotted void . It took her almost an hour to get to her destination, and she had several near-misses with cars. There was a total lack of sidewalks in most of the town, which made walking around it a nightmare.

When she finally arrived at the building from the video, she was both relieved and disappointed. The address belonged to a blue, two-story colonial house, with white-framed windows and cutesy fake shutters. The bottom floor was dedicated to a toy/souvenir shop, which proudly proclaimed that it was established in 1881. A jaunty paper sign in the door announced that the shop was open. It didn't look like the kind of place that a supervillain would be interested in.

Kamala pushed the door open, and a small bell dinged. Her eyes immediately gravitated towards the roped-off set of stairs at the back of the room. It could be living space. Or it could be really evil living space, where the Vulture kept his stuff and (possibly) hoarded teenagers.

She wandered around for a bit, feigning interest in the postcards and snowglobes and generic wooden buckets of bouncy balls. There were a few interesting-looking action figures under a big sign that said "exclusives", but besides that, there didn't seem to be much. Kamala selected a striped Redding-themed lollipop from a bucket of similar candy, and took it to the counter.

The cashier was an old man, with tufts of white hair sticking out from under his hat, which had the name of the store embroidered on it in gold letters. Kamala gave him $2.50 for her lollipop, then formulated a plan.

There were no convenient alleys to hide in, like there would be in the city, but the house backed onto a clump of woodland. Kamala strolled calmly out into the trees until the house was out of view, and shed the clothes she'd been wearing over her costume. She shrank down, then, after walking for what seemed like forever, returned to the toy store.

This was gonna be so gross.

Kamala oozed under the door, then to the left, so the shelving hid her from view. She spent a horrible moment in full-body contact with a carpet that had decades of dust and something suspiciously sticky ground into it, then darted along under the shelves to the staircase. Getting upstairs was fairly easy - if she was roughly the height of each stair, she was still too small to be seen over the cloth that covered the banisters. It felt like climbing a mountain, but the kind of mountain people took their kids to so they could introduce them to hiking.

The landing led to a hallway, which in turn led to four separate rooms. Framed photos on the wall displayed a girl with dark ringlets and blue-grey eyes, as a chubby-cheeked baby and an older kid with two faint, circular chickenpox scars above her right eyebrow. The first two doors on the landing revealed a linen closet and a small bathroom, and the third, a bedroom.

Kamala decided to snoop. Going by the starry carpet and Spider-Man bedspread, it wasn't exactly the kind of place an evil bird guy would hang out, but she couldn't afford to miss anything.

There was an NYU flag on the wall, above the neatly-made twin bed. The room didn't look exactly well-used. There was a handful of hair ties on the desk, tangled with dark, curly hairs, but they were covered in a thin layer of dust.

Avengers memorabilia was scattered around the room. Action figures abandoned on the shelves, a poster of the Avengers beside the window, and Spider-Man stickers in the corner of the corkboard above the desk. A white bookshelf held several of the new Captain America comics, and a lot of books, including the entire Harry Potter series. Two of its shelves were crowded with trophies, for fencing, dancing, karate, only a few that had actually placed. It was disappointingly ordinary.

The window looked out over the garden, where a rusting swingset dominated half the lawn, and a sprawling vegetable garden took up the other. A paved path snaked between the two, and there was a tree in one corner, its gnarled roots snaking under the fence and around what looked like a manhole cover.

Which was glowing.

In the shadow from the tree, Kamala could see the tiniest gleam of light spilling from the cover's edges.

She fought with the sticking latch, then unlocked the window and carefully slid the pane upwards, just enough for a slightly-smaller version of herself to slide out. Her falling-off-things strategy of becoming as tiny as possible cushioned her faceplant into the grass perfectly, and once she'd scrubbed the mud out of her eyes, she made a bee-line for the metal slab. She poked her head through one of the holes clearly intended for thumbs, and looked around. She was a little bit concerned that it might just be a septic tank, but it quickly became obvious that it was no such thing.

"Woah," Kamala whispered.

Falling onto brick seemed like a bad idea, so she used one tiny hand to keep a grip on the outside of the cover while she lowered herself down into the space below. Her landing sent up plumes of dirt.

She was standing in a cavernous space, with seemingly endless arches of brick, about ten feet apart. Dim, ruddy lighting cast a sickly glow into the corners of the space, the exposed wires duct taped to the ceiling, trailing up the arches and into the lights from a massive generator hulking in one corner. Moisture was collecting in the corners, staining the wall in places. The room looked like something from Harry Potter.

Most of the space was dominated by the vast skeleton of another wingsuit. The wings were fully outstretched, as if the suit was on display in a museum. Accessory turbines erupted from the back, visible through the gaps in the metal. In the centre of the wings, an exosuit dangled. Oddly complete leg bracers and metal gloves hung limp, the helmet dangling by thin leather bands securing it to the wingsuit.

Kamala took out her phone, and started walking towards the centre of the wings. She had a horrible sinking feeling about those hands. Turning one over, thankfully, didn't reveal a repulsor, but the armoured look of the gloves- gauntlets, really- suggested there was more to them than met the eye.

This wasn't the same metal as the others, she realised. The skeletal parts of the wings looked like something more… ordinary. Steel, maybe, shining like polished silverware. That was just odd - Spider-Man hadn't been able to punch through the original set, so it couldn't have had any hollow parts. And the scale was different, if only slightly - the gauntlets would have fit her hands. This design was new.

In the looming shadow of the wingsuit, Kamala explored more of the room. There were benches scattered throughout, most of which were covered in the dissected parts of weapons she didn't recognise. She didn't feel safe, there, breathing the stale air of place she shouldn't be in. The room seemed to stop at two steel doors, which looked incredibly out of place in the crumbling stone wall. Kamala decided not to touch them, namely because they were the only thing in the place that looked sophisticated enough to be equipped with an alarm.

The wingsuit was still her main focus.

She had to tell Tony Stark about this.


	15. Chapter 15

Peter was loosely curled up in bed, trying to work up the motivation to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when someone knocked on the door. He balked at the sound. Dealing with other people was hellish, right now, and if he could get two minutes of peace, he might be able to actually read one of the books Tony'd bought him. So far, he'd been alternating sleep, delirium, and being annoyed at nurses.

Medical staff saw things like doors and privacy as more of a formality than anything else, so Peter didn't bother answering. His throat hurt-everything hurt - and talking didn't seem worth it. Nothing fun was going to happen. Earlier, it'd been for an hour-long debate on the merits of oatmeal, because people working in a place where half of the admissions involved alien viruses or lasers had time to guilt-trip him into attempting breakfast. It seemed pointless. Even if they got him to eat, he couldn't keep up anyway.

The door opened. Peter wanted to bury his face in his pillow and scream. Would have, if he'd had the energy. Something anxious and constricting had been building in his chest since he'd been readmitted, and the constant monitoring wasn't helping. It was necessary, but it still made him feel like he was in 1984.

The nurse who came in was dimly familiar. Once Peter had answered the standard how-oriented-are-you questions, he realised he'd probably seen her before, when those questions weren't so easy to answer. She went through the standard process of making sure he wasn't actively dying, then asked the dreaded question.

"Can I take some more blood?" the nurse- Laura? Lauren? Peter had been too busy being bitter to pay attention when she said her name- asked. "I know it seems like a lot, but it's necessary. I won't have to stick you again, at least."

Peter nodded.

"I have a theory," he said, watching as Laura/en cleaned the cap on the unused port on the IV line in his arm.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Vampires," Peter said. Laura/en unscrewed the cap, and pushed a syringe of clear fluid through the tube. "It's a conspiracy. The phlebotomy lab's a sham. It's just vampires in there."

"Oh, no," Laura/en looked momentarily surprised, before she grinned. "You weren't supposed to find that out. Now our coven will have to move again."

Peter was going to answer, but then Laura/en actually started drawing blood, and it became clear something was wrong.

The stuff that flowed into her syringe- out of Peter's vein - didn't look like blood. Not quite. It was too translucent,clear at the edges, like wine. But Laura/en didn't seem worried. Maybe she just couldn't see the difference- it was subtle, even to him, and normal human eyes might not pick up on it.

Laura/en finished up, told Peter he'd done well, and left without telling him anything, mostly because he hadn't asked.

Peter picked at the bandages across his hands. Fissures had formed in the lines of his palms, sometime in the hours he couldn't remember, before they'd got him stable. They were being slowly twinned at the joints of his fingers, by pinkish, paper-cut sized cracks. It stung a bit to bend his fingers, but they weren't bleeding yet so it was probably fine.

Maybe the anemia was coming back.

He probably should have been more distressed about that. But this was the only place in the world where people knew what they were doing, with him. He was going to be okay.

Holding onto that thought was almost impossible; valium was a good muscle relaxant, but also good at messing with his brain to the point where logical thought was mostly overtaken by the mental equivalent of fluffy clouds. Everything was muffled by the haze of rosy neutrality, like buildings in a thick fog.

Peter gave up on reading. He didn't have an actual clock, but he knew it was time for a nap. He'd never felt so drained before.

He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Peter woke with a start, to the sound of more knocking. Waking up from these weird, fitful bursts of sleep made him feel like Captain America getting defrosted- totally divorced from the passage of time. It could have been twenty minutes, or three hours. He had no idea.

Maybe if he kept his eyes closed, they'd leave, and he could go back to sleep again. Congestion made his breathing loud. Maybe they could hear it.

The door opened. Peter felt abruptly exposed.

"Spidey?"

Bruce. Not another nurse. Just Bruce, who was quiet. And safe. And had known his parents. And actually saved his life , and therefore shouldn't be freaking him out. The anxiety seemed oddly distant- like he was observing it from outside his body.

"I'm awake," Peter mumbled, disoriented. The white lights illuminated the insides of his eyelids, turning everything red.

"You have a visitor," Bruce said. Peter could hear him smiling.

" Why ?" he whined.

"I brought brownies." a second voice said. There was a moment of processing; Peter's thoughts moving with the grace and speed of molasses. Then he opened his eyes and took all the complicated steps to almost-upright. It seemed like a titanic effort- everything ached from the exhaustion of last night, like he'd put his entire body through an ultramarathon.

"Aunt May?" He felt stupid asking. She was decked out in the standard smock, gloves, and surgical mask, but it was obviously her. She'd tied her hair back in a ponytail, which she hadn't done in a while.

In the fuzziness of his perception, she didn't seem quite real.

"Hi, sweetie," May said, softly. "I'm so sorry I couldn't be here sooner."

Peter didn't care, because he hadn't realised she was allowed to be here at all. He just held out his arms, and May embraced him. The tight, coiled thing in his chest began to unwind.

He'd missed her, tremendously. He hadn't realised just how much he depended on her presence.

That worried him.

But she was here, now. Warm and safe, running her fingers through his hair like when he was little. And that was all that mattered.

"So," May said, slowly pulling away. She kept steady eye contact as she took one one of the chairs at the bedside. This must be awful, for her. "Baked goods. Lots of baked goods, and cards. Eadie from accounting still thinks you like trucks, you know that?"

He'd been back in medical for less than twenty hours. When had these people had the time?

"I got you a balloon," Bruce said. Peter watched the balloon bob across the ceiling, sparkling and blue and emblazoned with the words 'Live Long and Prosper' and the corresponding vulcan hand sign. "Well, Natasha got you a balloon. I just brought it, since someone needed to act as an escort anyway, so-"

"Stay," Peter said. Bruce did so. "Wait, trucks?"

"Yeah, trucks." May looked through one of her multiple canvas tote bags, and pulled out a cellophane bag, tied with a bright blue ribbon. She presented it on an upturned palm. Inside were what looked like sugar cookies, iced with surprisingly well-drawn trucks. "I'm not sure why she's stuck on the trucks, but she made you cookies, so you have to be grateful."

The trucks were subtly Avengers-themed, in red and gold, green and purple, red and black.

"What if they're gross?" Peter asked. May promptly undid the ribbon.

"Try one," she said. Technically, that was an option.

Peter didn't want to ruin the moment, so he did. The icing dented under his fingertips, smudging the red and gold tow truck. In the fraction of a second it took to get the cookie into his mouth, his hand began trembling. He dreaded it, with the most clarity he'd felt anything since yesterday. As he chewed and swallowed, a nauseating tide of sweetness flooded his senses. He was struck by the urge to scrape his mouth out, like he'd bitten into a bar of soap.

"It's gingerbread ," he mumbled, trying to sound like gingerbread wasn't repulsive right now. For a horrible moment, before he forced himself to swallow, the taste alone seemed like enough to make him vomit. "Awesome."

May smiled.

"When did I like trucks?" Peter asked, trying to shift the topic. "I don't- I don't remember that."

"When you were… three, I think," Bruce said. He grinned, slightly, the smile suggesting nostalgia."You wanted to be a truck engineer."

Peter had precisely no memory of being three.

"He wrote a little report about trucks," May said. She'd shifted her attention to Bruce, because adults had an inbuilt evolutionary drive to tell embarrassing stories about their children. "When he was in kindergarten. His hypothesis was, 'Everyone thinks dump trucks are the best even though semi trucks are better.' Do you remember that, Peter?"

"Vaguely?" Peter shrugged. The movement burned.

It'd been awful science- his sample size had been the kids in class who would talk to him, which meant Ned Leeds, and two other boys who he'd traded cookies with.

May took a few cards out of her tote, and handed them over. Peter took a moment to realise he was supposed to open the envelopes. Eadie was consistent with the truck theme- her card featured a cartoon truck with orange lettering that said "thought you could use a little pickup".

"It was really good, for a five-year-old," May said, then looked back at Bruce. "When I was five I could barely read . We were all so impressed. His teacher wanted to bump him up two grades. Two grades!"

"Wow," Bruce said. "When I was in kindergarten, I just tried to bribe people with fruit snacks."

"I can't imagine you in kindergarten," Peter said, handing the cards back and gingerly rubbing his eyes. He could see the ribbon on the cookies in his peripheral vision, so he laid back down and pretended they weren't there. Staying upright was getting exhausting, anyway. "Maybe like… college. College is a stretch."

"Jeez, Spider-Man," Bruce said. "I'm not that old."

His greying hair said otherwise. Peter said nothing.

"Your parents met Bruce when they were in college," May said, taking another cellophane bag from her tote. "If you're calling Bruce old, you're calling them old, and by extension calling me old, which you're not allowed to do. Someone made you fudge, by the way."

In the next ten minutes, Peter accrued six more cards, two more bags of cookies, a tupperware of m&m brownies, some fudge, and a plethora of blankets. He wasn't sure why people thought he needed so many blankets, but he appreciated the effort. They could give out the rest. The mental image of some random scary agent getting a knit blanket with red and gold checks or pastel blue stripes or little suns was too good not to bring into reality.

"How are your hands?" May asked, finally. It'd been bothering her, because this sort of thing always did. Usually Peter could hide it.

"Fine," Peter said, because they were. His palms had gone from burning to aching to itching, and it was more annoying than anything else. He didn't go into detail; he didn't want to gross her out. "How's New York?"

"It's still standing so far," May said. "Daredevil's been popping up in the news a lot. I think the media misses you."

"I, uh… I'm a local celebrity," Peter said. Homesickness hit, heavy and constricting around his heart. "'Course they miss me. Can I have another hug?"

"Of course," May said. There was an unspoken understanding that this wouldn't be brief. Peter let his head loll onto May's shoulder as she hugged him, the papery isolation gown crinkling against his ear.

No amount of superhuman strength could ever make him feel this safe.

May rubbed loose, gentle circles on Peter's back, one of the things she'd done back when he was small enough to curl up in her lap.

"You're not s'posed to be touching me," he said, clinging, trying not to cough into her hair.

"They can't stop me hugging you ," May said. "They're not soulless. Right?"

"I can vouch for… at least four souls between us," Bruce said. "I'm not sure about Vision, though. Or Natasha."

"Why Natasha?" Peter mumbled. He was melting into sleepy contentment, and probably wouldn't be awake much longer. "Nat's- she's nice."

Neither May nor Bruce answered, though- they were both distracted. The door opened again, and Peter caught a glimpse of red hair.

Speak of the devil.

Peter yawned. Even that movement was painful.

Natasha wasn't alone. Ms. Marvel peeked out from behind her, like a child hiding behind their mother's skirts. She was dwarfed by her papery smock, even more than May was. The garish yellow reflected back on her brown skin, like when someone held a buttercup under their chin.

"Hi, Spider-Man," she said quietly, giving an awkward little wave. Her face was a tangle of shyness and worry. She nervously cracked the fingers on one gloved hand, at once staring and trying not to do so. She averted her eyes, then looked to May. "Hi, everyone."

"Hey," Peter said, lifting his head to make brief eye contact. He liked her, but he was starting to feel...crowded. Too many people in too little space. "Why are you here?"

"Tony's being a shut-in," Natasha explained. She laid a hand on Ms. Marvel's shoulder, a bizarrely affectionate action, from her. "So I've got a shadow."

"Are we opening an after-school program, Nat?" Bruce asked. "Should I find some genius kid to turn into a mini-hulk? I'm starting to feel left out."

"Spider-Man," Ms. Marvel said. She twisted her fingers together. "I. Um. I wanted to tell you something. If you're okay with that? It's about the evil bird guy."

Peter detached from his aunt and scraped together the willpower to be welcoming. His head was starting to ache, stuffy pain pressing inwards from his forehead, radiating out across his face. Awkwardness was rolling off Ms. Marvel in waves, and it was becoming mutual.

"What'd he do now ? Bird crimes?" he asked. "He's really bad at sticking to the bird theme. Do you want a cookie?"

"You don't stick to the spider theme," Ms. Marvel said. "And I don't think there's been a moment in my life where I haven't wanted a cookie but, like... Am I allowed?"

It occurred to Peter that she couldn't eat in an isolation room, because duh .

" Excuse you , I totally stick to the spider theme," he said. He shrugged, then waited for his train of thought to catch up. "And. Um. I got way too many cookies."

Peter was gonna buy Ms. Marvel's friendship with baked goods. It wasn't nice exactly, but she seemed pretty cool, and he really missed his friends from school. There was a certain solidarity that it was hard to get with people twenty years his senior.

"I mean, if there's cookies up for grabs, I'm down," said, shrugging. She seemed so jittery , like she had too much nervous energy to fit in her body. Was that what Peter looked like, normally?

"She's right," Bruce said, to Natasha. "Sticking to walls isn't spider-exclusive."

"Geckos," Natasha whispered. "Centipedes."

Peter was getting tired. He'd been tired when the conversation started, but it was getting harder and harder to keep his eyes open. And now people were comparing him to centipedes.

"Oh, Spider-Man," Ms. Marvel said. "Did I tell you about my dog?"

That caught Peter's attention, and a little of the tension left Ms. Marvel's shoulders when she saw him smile.

He shook his head, wished he hadn't. His vision swam for a second.

"Tree frogs." May suggested, further contributing to the list of ridiculous animals Peter could have dressed up as. Bruce hmm 'd in response.

"Huh, I thought I did. His name is Lockjaw and he's really awesome. He teleports," Ms. Marvel said. "And my neighbours got a newfie, right, and since Lockjaw is giant and that dog is giant- they're friends. Giant dog friends. It's adorable ."

She was avoiding the subject of the Vulture. Because she thought Peter was too fragile to even talk about him.

"That does sound adorable," Peter said. "Are there pictures?"

He tamped down all thoughts of his downward spiral, and allowed himself to melt into the moment. He was surrounded by friends, starting to recover, and had cute fluffy animals to look at. It was peaceful and protected.

For once, he felt safe.


	16. Chapter 16

Spending time with Peter was starting to seem pointless.

Peter was asleep more than he wasn't, and even when he was awake, he didn't seem to enjoy Tony's presence much. There were moments where the only response he could manage was asking to be left alone. This wasn't one of them, but considering how close Peter was to nodding off again, Tony would probably be leaving soon. It was guilt that kept him there, really- knowing he'd put Peter in a place where risking this was the best option.

May had been the only person to get consistent interaction out of him, and even that had been shaky.

The others were in and out. It seemed easier, for them. Rhodey talked about physiotherapy, because he could stretch 'it's not as scary it sounds' into an entire conversation. Bruce and Natasha were tactile, in little ways that Tony outright didn't get . Spider-Man didn't seem like the kind of person who would find anything but embarrassment in literally having his hand held, but Natasha could get away with it. It wasn't fair.

Peter was...declining. The staff in medical were frustratingly uncommunicative, but Tony knew how a pulse oximeter worked and he knew that '89' was not as good a reading as the '97' he'd seen initially. Peter was spacing out more, and there was a faint, purplish tint to the beds of his five visible fingernails. The rest of his hands were obscured by the glove-like dressings medical used sometimes, one of Helen Cho's earlier ideas. They shaped perfectly to his skin, seamless.

"Anyway," Tony said, catching Peter's waning attention and repeating himself for the third time in the past five minutes. "What are your thoughts on patterns? You like patterns, right?"

Peter nodded, his eyes looking oddly empty.

They'd found a source of contagion. And told him about it. A needlestick; someone working with his blood had slipped up, stabbed their finger, and collapsed in agony twenty minutes later.

"I like. I dunno. Stripes and stuff." Peter said said. "And spiders. 'Cause I'm narcissistic..."

Tony picked up the book sitting on his nightstand- 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe', which meant it'd taken him a full three days to get through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"Are you enjoying these?"

Another nod. Peter closed his eyes, and didn't open them again.

Tony leafed through the book. The pages were crinkled in places, like they were water-damaged. A few were stuck together. Peter wasn't normally careless with books, especially not pretty, expensive, folio society books, but he had an excuse at this point. Tony didn't mind.

A bright red bookmark was wedged between the pages, about a third of the way through. Something was clinging to the pages leading up to it; thick, yellowish-white flakes of a substance Tony didn't recognise, each no bigger than a fingernail. His attention shifted from the bookmark. There was a discernible, strangely familiar pattern in some of the larger pieces- fine, looping parabolas like the grooves on a record. One page had a dark smudge on the corner, a half-circle of the stuff stuck to the page in the centre of it, like a wax seal. The words underneath were just visible.

Tony flipped to the bookmark, and found more. A lot more. A jagged curve of the stuff, with three offshoots, one much longer than the others. It looked like a poorly-drawn capital E.

There was a complete disk in the dog-eared corner of the page.

Suddenly the pattern clicked.

Fingerprints.

Tony gently set the book down. The disgust was a physical sensation, twisting in his stomach. He considered waking Peter, but he didn't have to- all he had to do was glance at the boy's bandaged hands.

He calmly, quietly got up from his chair, tiptoed out of the room, and scrubbed his arms with hand sanitizer up to the elbows. By the time he was done, his fingers were starting to burn. He felt contaminated, like he'd found a bug at the bottom of his coffee cup.

He wondered if it had hurt.

Once he was out in the corridor again, surrounded by white walls and the smell of hospital-clean sterility, Tony relaxed slightly, in that he no longer wanted to shower in straight bleach. He wanted an explanation. A nice, neat, medical explanation that would reveal the logic behind this, and maybe help to get the image out of his head.

He didn't get one. The shift nurse- who looked at him like he was something nasty she'd stepped in- had a list of probable causes but nothing concrete. Varying medical reasons for poor wound healing, spreading infection, things Peter's body might do that nobody else's would. By the end of their conversation, Tony wanted to slap her for being so useless.

Running off to his workshop was not the empathetic thing to do, but the smell of motor oil and metalwork was calming, and Tony really needed to be calmed. When the doors shut, the outside world ceased to exist.

"Friday," Tony told the air, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He wasn't sure how long it'd been in the pot, but he spiked it anyway, and no bacteria could survive that. "I need you to- go to, god, I don't know, pubmed or something. Wherever the doctor-types put their papers. And find anything that looks like...this."

The next half-hour was an exercise in frustration and shifting search parameters. There was nothing that fit, because medicine was a complicated and stupid thing, and the research was even worse. Peter followed a typical course for most illnesses, but that didn't matter when everyone in the literature was four times his age or had umpteen chronic conditions that complicated things.

A couple years ago, Tony would have just gone and gotten a degree, but there were more immediate ways to deal with this. Mostly just aesthetic measures- medical technology was a lot less depressing when it didn't look like it was put together before humanity had invented things like colours and basic design principles.

It was oddly difficult to look at the renders, even just on a screen. Seeing his sleek, minimal designs wrapped in bright blues and cheery plaid shouldn't have bothered him so much. Hawkeye liked purple . Natasha- who'd made money killing, for decades- owned socks with little pink flowers. There was no reason for Tony's mind to keep wandering back to the cutesy cartoon animals on baby bp cuffs.

It didn't feel like enough. None of it felt like enough.

Even with all of the monitoring and the one-on-one care, there was always a chance that something would slip through the cracks. Because Peter wasn't quite biochemically normal, and every now and then there'd be...something. A drug that didn't work right, a poison that shouldn't be. They'd studied it, Tony and Peter and Bruce, noting down the irregularities. Looking for trends that they could work off of. Thus far, there'd been none.

It was like treating Steve but without the preparation. Steve was a lot of things, but one of them was better-understood. Mostly through trial and error. He'd woken up mid-surgery and had umpteen-million drug elimination curves graphed. That sort of thing translated, sometimes.

Peter knew that this was new territory for everyone involved. It was probably terrifying- not knowing if half of the treatments would even work.

A lot of this was terrifying.

Tony's phone buzzed in his pocket, and he sighed.

He knew exactly who that was, and he really, really didn't want to deal with her right now.

Ms. Marvel was a sweet, enthusiastic girl with no concept of the word 'stop' . Tony had to commend her for obsessively playing Nancy Drew, even with the small stuff, but he was pretty much the worst possible person for her to consult. He was self-absorbed and busy, and had gotten the last peppy teenage superhero he interacted with hospitalised . Watching these kids glom onto him was like watching toddlers stick forks in an electrical socket. They didn't know any better, but it was still terrifying to see actual humans being so stupid.

Ms. Marvel liked Rhodey. Maybe he could redirect her to Rhodey? Or Natasha. They could stab things and paint their nails, or whatever Natasha did in her free time.

What he saw on the screen, though, made him reconsider.

Not another wingsuit, thankfully, though she'd badgered him incessantly about that too.

Ms. Marvel had sent him a screenshot, and a hyperlink, to what looked like a lawsuit in the making.

Anyone could knock together a bunch of metal and some pretty paint, and now, someone had. People with far too much time on their hands did it in their back yards, in the run-up to comic con.

The website Ms. Marvel had linked to featured a poorly-edited promo video, which showed the device in action. It was entirely silent- the woman in the video displayed a blue and silver gauntlet, then spread her fingers, showing the repulsor in the centre. She stepped away from the camera, revealing a backpack with wires snaking out of it and into her gauntlet, then took aim at a block of metal- helpfully marked as 'solid steel' by floating green text- and fired.

The white balance on the camera went nuts, so the effect on the metal could be seen through the blinding flash. The video ended with a close-up of the melted hole in the metal, and an end-screen with prices and a phone number.

It was probably fake. Hopefully fake, because Tony was in no mood to deal with another Ivan Vanko right now.

Another text.

'Should I look into this?'

Tony considered that for a moment. So far, none of the showy engineering had really payed off. Whatever plan had started with Peter being taken hostage seemed to have failed, or been aborted partway through. The Vulture's suit looked impressive, and if this was by the same person, it might actually be legitimate. It was just very, very low-priority right now. Off-the-bottom-of-the-scale priority.

Tony decided to put a pin in it, if only for the potential slap-fight later. He sent back a simple reply-

'Sure.'


	17. Chapter 17

Kamala was back in Redding, and she was blonde. Because blondes had more fun, blended in better, and, most importantly, were more likely to get away with buying probably-illegal and highly destructive technology on the black market.

Tony Stark had shoved her at a stylist and paid her passage to Connecticut. It was super nice of him, but the stylist had put her in questionable white jeans and an even more questionable off-the-shoulder top. She knew that the Vulture probably wasn't going to judge her for her lewd, lewd exposed shoulders, but she still felt uncomfortable without sleeves.

She squinted at the map on her phone. Google was lagging. She chewed her gum, which Natasha had given her- it had little blue flavour crystals in it, which would provide a minty fresh audio feed from whatever location she stuck it in. The gravity of this task was starting to freak her out, making her anxiously twitchy, like she'd had too much caffeine.

The app guided her across the small town. Her shapeshifting had come in handy, but she was probably only here because Iron-Man knew Spider-Man liked her, and therefore had a vested interest in keeping her around.

Shit.

Spider-Man.

Logically, this was all just complications of being mauled. Kamala had done her research. He just seemed to have been incredibly unlucky. But the terrigen mist was a confounding variable. Nobody with similarly scrambled DNA had been exposed to it, as far as she knew, and it was already messing with his healing factor.

Anything could happen.

The address Kamala had been sent to was a sad, gray, former Pizza Hut. She could tell by the unique shape of the roof, and the badly painted over 'Pizza Hut' sign.

Kamala stepped through the door. A small bell dinged as she did so. The shop wasn't laid out like a normal store- a metal partition with two doors in it divided the space, leaving a few square metres of linoleum floor, and a counter, staffed by a young woman who was scrolling through her phone. She perked up when she saw Kamala, though, and made an obvious effort to look like she hadn't just been on twitter.

"Hi," Kamala said, feeling through her uncomfortably fancy tote bag for her uncomfortably fancy wallet. "I saw your website?"

"Yup," the woman said. Her dark, curly hair was in a messy bun, and she was wearing a sleeveless top that revealed impressively muscular arms. Her name tag labeled her as 'Sammy.' "Do you want to book an appointment? We could fit you in now, if you don't."

Just visible beneath the woman's bangs were two faint, circular scars.

"Now is fine," Kamala shrugged shoulders that didn't feel like hers, hypervigilant. She saw the scars. She saw the connection. She didn't, for once, leap to conclusions. "I have time."

"Cool."

Sammy lead her behind the counter, and through a door in the partition. The room they stepped into took up less than half the available was another door in the back- Kamala was thinking two rooms and a storage closet. There was a workbench and stool up against each wall, with a chair in front of each bench, like a bizarrely industrial nail salon.

Sammy guided Kamala to a bench, and handed her a waiver and iPad. Kamala signed with her body double's name, then picked up the tablet.

"Pick out your options there, okay?" Sammy said, before turning away to rummage through the drawers of the workbench. Kamala surreptitiously stuck her gum under the table, and relaxed slightly. At least that was over.

She flicked through the menus on the iPad screen, and picked a right-handed, elbow-length gauntlet that was fully armed, in purple and silver. Her heart was starting to pound. This was going to take a long time.

"Right," Sammy said, taking the iPad and examining Kamala's choices. She offered a card reader, and Kamala paid thousands of dollars with a single swipe, using a card she hadn't seen before that morning. It felt a little bit obscene.

From under the desk, Sammy produced a square metal frame with what looked like molten black plastic stretched across it.

"Hold out your hand for me," she said. She gripped Kamala's right wrist with gloved fingers, too tight, almost rough. "Could you spread your fingers, please?"

Kamala did so, and Sammy moved the frame slowly over her hand, with her fingertips centred in the substance inside. It was cool, and had the strangest texture- like liquid rubber. It didn't drip or run, though- it was like sliding her hand into a horribly mushy glove. Kamala grimaced, working to avoid flinching back from the skin-crawling sensation.

"It's gross, I know. Hold that there," Sammy said, producing a spool of fabric that looked almost like a roll of bandages. Once the gluey stuff had solidified, she wound the fabric carefully around Kamala's arm. "Okay, we're going to let that dry, and I'll get you some protective equipment."

She left through the door at the back of the room, and Kamala took the chance to look around properly. The walls were painted white, the floor bare concrete. The small, dark dome of a CCTV camera poked through the ceiling in the corner. Wall-mounted shelves supported plastic bins of screws and metal. It didn't look all that evil, even in the dim glow of a single swinging strip light.

Sammy came back with a heavy apron and face shield for each of them, and Kamala braced for something awful.

The actual process was both very strange and slightly terrifying, like getting a tooth out with only local anesthetic. Sammy built the gauntlet onto Kamala's body, with all the power tools, vibrations and flying sparks one would expect. They made awkward small talk throughout the procedure, and Kamala used the periodic lulls in the conversation to do two things: assess and worry.

The room really didn't seem that bizarre. Sure, it was an illegal workshop that sold poorly-plagiarized, highly advanced, and extremely dangerous weaponry to utterly clueless civilians, and it was staffed by a girl who lived next door to an evil lair, but other than that, it was just... boring.

Sammy soldered the first few wires to the mesh of fabric she'd put on Kamala's arm, the heat seeping through to her skin. She became very aware that there'd be electricity right there, up against her flesh. The girl in the video had needed a backpack-sized battery pack, which was miles away from the safety of an arc reactor.

She didn't have to fire it until she got back to the compound, at least. Tony Stark wanted to see her do it. Judging by the construction, the repulsor blast would probably put a hole through her hand.

Sammy clicked a set of miniature missiles into place.

Stolen tech made from stolen materials, being constructed onto Kamala. It wasn't a comfortable feeling.

Spider-Man would probably think it was cool, though. She tried to channel that mindset.

Sammy connected the wires of a small, purple button. She hooked the gauntlet up to a socket in the bench and pressed it. The skeleton of hinges and joints around Kamala's arm juddered, before rising up off the rubbery black substance underneath. Kamala felt the buzzing of the robotics in her bones- there was nothing to dampen the sensation.

They had to be cutting a lot of corners, to manage this. Comfort was probably one of them.

An Iron Man suit cost more than most fighter jets. Even a fraction of it shouldn't be so... not cheap, but comparatively reasonable. It was an investment that a decent market of people could make.

Satisfied with the moving parts, Sammy welded some of them down and pressed the button again. The gauntlet went limp, like a loose glove. Kamala shifted in her metal seat, trying not to look anxious.

They had the ability to produce way more advanced versions of this. They were probably selling the crappier model as a way of funding their bigger projects. Which they wanted for... reasons. Maybe to fight the remnants of the Avengers. Maybe for other forms of personal gain.

Maybe Spider-Man was just the first in a long line of casualties. This could get so, so much worse- she'd seen the damage Tony's other copycats could do. In the wrong hands, this technology could level a city block.

Over the next few hours, the gauntlet took shape, emerging from disparate curves of metal and showers of sparks. It looked pretty from the outside; all elegant curves and bright colours. The metal gleamed, so shiny Kamala could see her face reflected in it.

And some other things.

Above her head was a trapdoor, hidden as one of the tiles in the ceiling. It was a good disguise- the only giveaway was the little black space on each side of the tile. There was a square-ish hump on the top of the building, like there was on every former Pizza Hut, and it must have lead up there- but Kamala didn't have the tools to investigate it. She couldn't shapeshift now , and even if she'd had the privacy, that might have been a bit beyond her. Holding a form was like holding your breath- even with training, it was difficult to do for a long time. Kamala's skin was starting to ache, as if she'd stretched it manually, rather than with her powers. And Tony Stark wanted her back by a certain time.

That trapdoor had completely escaped her first assessment of the space. What else was she missing?

Kamala tried her best to survey the room as her hand was turned over and manipulated. One of the rhinestones - at least, she hoped they were just rhinestones - on her purse was a camera, but it could only see what Kamala saw, and she was facing the wall. By the time the gauntlet was finished, she'd exhausted all non-suspicious ways of looking around the room.

"Could you wiggle your fingers?" Sammy asked. Kamala did so, her hand still tingling from the vibration of the power tools. The armour was surprisingly lightweight.

"I like it," she said, giving a sticky, lipgloss-laden smile. The wispy white-girl hair had stuck to her lipgloss at every opportunity, including this one. "Thank you."

Leaving the place was a relief. It felt like stepping out of a lion's den; like she didn't have to watch her every move, anymore. The outside air was cool, compared to the back room, which had trapped the heat of the power tools and slowly turned into a hellish oven.

Kamala kept her blonde persona until she got to the train station, trying to appear more comfortable than she had any right to feel with an illegal weapon in her purse. At the trains station, she became herself again in a horrible-smelling public bathroom, bought something at the gift shop, and began the long, long journey back to the Avengers' compound.

Hopefully, this would be worth it.

Tony Stark was waiting for her down in his workshop.

He was glaring at a hologram, and didn't acknowledge her when she entered. His hair stuck up at odd angles, like he'd been running his hands through it.

"Hi?" Kamala flicked a window up on the 'screen' in front of him- a series of patterns, a lot of which looked nearly identical.

"Do these look stupid to you?" He pointed to the patterns, finally turning to her. "I need a new set of eyes, here. What did you find?"

Kamala wandered over. The workshop didn't look as nice as it had a few days ago- the creep of clutter was beginning to set in, tools and papers abandoned on every surface. With nobody else in it, the space seemed cavernous, empty.

"I think they're for real," she said, lifting the purple gauntlet out of her stupid giant tote. It shone in the glow of the holograms, like the iridescent carapace of a beetle.

She briefly turned her attention to the patterns, picked one- soft blueish gray with a familiar net of white lines- and pointed. "I like this one. Are these for…"

"Spider-Man, yeah; secret project," Tony said. "Want to go outside and see if you can actually fire that thing?"

"Sure," Kamala said, but her focus had shifted.

A secret project. That involved lots of frivolous patterns, and took a lot of time.

She couldn't help but consider why.

It was a simple explanation, really. She'd seen that dramatic decline. And the reaction made her even more worried. People didn't do that sort of coddling, not unless something was very, very wrong.

Outside, the wind was picking up. It was going to rain; there was a clinging moisture in the air. The sky was a tense, smothering grey.

Tony Stark, who'd apparently never seen a Smokey the Bear ad, hooked the gauntlet up to a power source and leveled her hand at a large tree, just inside the perimeter fence, like he didn't trust her to aim. The firing mechanism was simple.

When she pressed the button, the tree exploded.

There was no time between the two. Just the joint-wrenching recoil, and blinding light. The smell of smoke and energy, like after a lightning strike. The sky seemed to shudder, and the first few drops of rain fell on the blackened husk the blast had left behind.

" Well ," Tony Stark said. "That's just insulting."

Water turned to steam on the palm of the gauntlet. Tony grabbed for it, then pulled his fingers back from the heat. His lips curled into an expression of raw contempt.

"Jesus, that's a disappointment," he said, spacing out the words, staccato. The rain didn't seem to bother him. "This is barbaric . Anything else?"

"There was a trapdoor in the ceiling," Kamala supplied, as they started back towards the compound. She surrendered her arm so he could play with the gauntlet.

"And?" Tony asked. He slowly manipulated her fingers, then released her arm from the armour.

"I didn't have the opportunity to get further information." Kamala shrugged.

"Yes, you did," Tony said, picking at the gauntlet the way someone might pick apart a particularly awful casserole. "You just missed your chance."

Kamala wondered why she'd ever liked this guy. She wondered why people liked him at all.

"You told me to get something and be back by four. I got the thing," she said. "I was back by four. If I'd done anything else, I wouldn't have been back in the time frame you gave me."

"I'm not saying you didn't do great at that part ," Tony said. "It's- look, it doesn't matter. Forget I said it. You don't have to be Natasha for this to work. Good job. Keep going."

Kamala wanted to. Desperately, desperately wanted to.

But she didn't know where to go next.


	18. Chapter 18

Peter was finally starting to get stronger. Sort of. The aching exhaustion that had overtaken his body and turned his muscles to putty was starting to fade. There was a limit, though. His pulse still hadn't dropped below 110.

And they didn't know why. Otherwise they would have told him.

He was trying not to think about it.

In the latter half of yesterday, there'd been another very... frank discussion about nutrition. Apparently, there was a limit to the number of mashed-potato sculptures you could make before your nurses started getting mad. The talk had started with Peter throwing a fork in frustration, and ended with a nasogastric feeding tube, which snaked through his left nostril, down his throat, and into his stomach.

The tape against his face itched.

He was trying not to think about that, either.

He'd propped his tablet up on the arm-table, because using his hands wasn't really an option anymore, and was talking to Ned for the first time in ages.

"Michelle says she misses you," Ned told him. Peter raised an eyebrow.

"Who told you that, and what have they done with the _real_ Michelle?" His voice was pathetically hoarse, even to him. Whatever upper-respiratory nonsense had been bugging him was starting to come to a head.

"She put you in a magic coma in our campaign," Ned continued. "And she wants me to tell you that she wasted a spell slot drawing a dick on your face with mage hand."

Peter was about to answer, when someone knocked on the door.

His heartbeat was suddenly audible in his ears, hummingbird fast.

"Peter?" Ned asked.

"Hang on-" Peter muted the tablet speaker and microphone, then set it face-down on the arm table. He groaned inwardly when he realised who was knocking. Tony.

Peter liked Tony, he really did. Tony was the reason he hadn't bled out in the forest, or died immediately from this infection, the reason this series of medical crises wasn't going to make him homeless. But Tony was tiring. Tony stopped being pleasant to talk to when you couldn't keep up with him, and right now, Peter had no chance.

Anxiety boiled up inside him as Tony stepped into the room, into his personal bubble. It was a new sort of discomfort, a tight, crawling thing, twisting under his skin.

"Hi," Tony said. He was carrying a chair and a white plastic bag, looking at Peter like he was a live explosive. "Are you okay to talk, for a while?"

"Yeah," Peter said. "I- I'm good."

He wasn't sure how much he'd been forgiven. Not yet. Tony needed him to prove some sort of stability. Peter was mature enough to realise that.

"I could come back later, if you want," Tony said.

Peter wished Tony would just _say_ stuff. Half the time, it was like he opened his mouth and enigma code came out.

Peter could practically hear the hidden meaning going over his head. It wasn't threatening, exactly, but presented enough of a threat to kick up the beginnings of not-quite-precognition, adding to the constant buzz at the base of his skull. A warning against damage that was already being done.

"No, no, now is fine, I promise." Peter scrambled for the words, with a little too much force. His lungs rebelled, and he choked on nothing.

Suddenly, there was no air in the room.

The worst part was trying to breathe. The coughing wouldn't stop long enough for him to actually inhale, so it was a near-endless cycle of choking agony, than a half-second where he'd try and fail to take in enough air for the next, then a horrible repeat of the process, until the lack of oxygen started to make him dizzy. Just as his vision began to go black, luck allowed him another desperate gasp.

Then, contact. Tony's gloved hand on his back, achingly intrusive, a prickling discomfort radiating out from the touch.

The coughing _hurt_. It stung his throat and made his chest ache, put enough pressure on the new incision to strain at the staples. The nurses had told him to hug a pillow when these paroxysms came, to put pressure on the wound, but he hadn't had the chance to do that. He could feel the stupid tube shift with every lurch of muscle.

Tears beaded in his eyes and threatened to spill down his cheeks, as a byproduct of the sheer _effort_ that went into the process. When it was over, when he was swallowing chunky mucus and breathing like he'd almost drowned, he felt almost guilty.

Tony had watched patiently the entire time. There was nothing visible of his face but his eyes, and the bags beneath them.

 _'Do you know how scary this is for me?'_

That phrase was one of Peter's clearest memories since he'd been re-admitted. Realising just how much he'd been hurting everyone else.

He hadn't, not really, not until that point. Not until it was said aloud- he'd been too preoccupied, stuck in his own head.

"Sorry," he croaked. Tony shrugged.

"Nothing you can do about that," he said. He offered the bag. "Your girlfriend got you this."

"Girlfriend?" Peter asked. The words scratched in his raw throat. "I don't have a girlfriend."

He wanted to run. To hide. For no discernable reason. It was the same sensation that had him stammering through PowerPoints in school, worse by an order of magnitude.

"If you say so," Tony said. He was walking on eggshells; too subdued. He had been holding the bag out for a solid five seconds when Peter actually remembered to take it.

Inside was a teddy bear, dressed in the blue uniform of a revolutionary soldier, and an envelope. Peter considered the logistics of opening an envelope with a few fingertips and a lot of willpower, then started picking at the glued-down flap.

It didn't work. The yellow paper was unyielding.

He tried harder, scraping away at the seam with the corner of his thumbnail. He could feel Tony watching, patient and quiet like he never was. But he couldn't seem to muster the force or fine motor skills to actually _open_ the thing. A stinging heat began to prick behind his eyes. He could feel his face going red.

A goddamn envelope.

Gun-wielding lunatics, an alien invasion, and the collapse of the greatest super-human team on Earth- all things Peter had managed to deal with. But a piece of pastel paper was where he met his match.

 _That_ was how bad this had gotten.

Peter kept trying, though, because it was just fucking _paper_ , and even though his hands were shaking and it really, really hurt to put any pressure on his fingertips and it was getting harder to breathe and god, he was going to cry again-

Tony snatched the envelope out of his hands.

"Don't," he said, his voice measured and taught. "Just… Christ. Don't."

He tore the top of the envelope, pulled out the card inside. The front was rich, cream-coloured paper, inset with a photo of some cutesy town he didn't recognise. Tony opened it, read aloud.

"This is cheesy, but- keep fighting," he said. "And she's drawn a little lightning bolt, isn't that adorable?"

"I could have read that." Peter could feel his heartbeat in his chest, a stinging, forceful thing, as if every _lub-dub_ resulted in a shockwave. "Are- are you done? I'm tired."

He didn't like any of this- the side-effects of being so sick; the stiff concern that had overcome everyone, and the crushing, coddling _closeness_ that was being forced on him now.

"One more thing," Tony said. Peter had never been more desperate for solitude in his _life_. "At some point today, the nurses are going to come by with something cool for you."

Peter let his composure slip, allowing his shoulders to sag, let out a soft, weak sigh.

"Okay," he said.

He did actually sleep, once he'd manipulated Tony into leaving him alone and said goodbye to Ned. Because it felt a little bit less awful to be like this, with nobody there to see him do it.

Waking up was an arduous process.

Sound, first. Knocking. Then the gluey taste of saliva dried in his mouth- he couldn't breathe too well through his nose, and pillow-drooling was inevitable. Bluer, harsher, artificial light, in place of the sunlight that had been coming through the window

Then, nausea.

Peter groaned, gritting his teeth, and opened one eye.

One of the gratingly cheery nurses had returned.

"Hi there," she said. Peter squinted up at her, dimly registered blonde hair. Call-me-Katie-Kathryn, then, not Lauren.

"Why're you here?" he asked.

"Tony Stark sent you a present," she said.

Peter huffed in frustration. He didn't want to be awake, but he hand no choice, now. The pressing alertness of anxiety had crept up on him.

"Tony's…" he mumbled, "a _jerk_ "

"He's a jerk who made you something really nice," the nurse placated. "Do you want to see?"

Peter really didn't, because that might mean keeping her in this space longer, but he didn't have the strength for an argument.

"Fine," he said. He forced his eyes to focus on the strappy mess she was holding, and the patterns suddenly made sense. Webbing. The same pattern as his suit was transposed onto the silky fabric. He was pretty sure it was another Range of Motion brace, because it looked how his current one would, if it was in the movie _Blade Runner_. But a new brace meant more touch, and he really, really didn't want that.

"Look on the bright side," Katie said, moving aside his blanket to undo the straps of the normal brace. "It's not as ugly as this one."

Peter nodded, and tried not to draw back when her gloved hands brushed his skin. There was a grotesque intimacy to it, and at this point, even the gentlest touch made his skin crawl.

"We're going to get physio in here with you at some point," Katie smiled under her mask, trying to be reassuring. "Now that you're a little more awake."

"Like for…" Peter hissed as she eased his leg off of the old brace, which had collapsed into a net of itself when she undid the straps. Every movement registered as unsafe. "Crutches and stuff?"

"Yup," Katie said. "And stuff."

"I walk on the ceiling," Peter blurted, mostly to distract himself. The lingering sensation of Katie's hands- slightly cooler than he was, but so so human and so so _there-_ was starting to turn his stomach. "I- how'm I supposed to practice stuff if-if- nobody else can walk on the ceiling?"

"Good question," Katie finally, finally started strapping up the new brace. She'd tried to make it quick, Peter could tell. "With Tony Stark in your corner, though, it probably won't be a challenge."

"Yeah," Peter mumbled, as she locked the brace with a loud _click_ , limiting his range of motion.

By the time Peter had mentally scrubbed the sensation of touch away, the nausea was getting worse. Probably because he'd avoided getting the stupid tube's position checked. He didn't want the contact.

"Watch this," Katie said, then flicked off the lightswitch.

The webbing pattern on the brace lit up with a blue-white glow. Peter noted that it was faint, probably so it wouldn't keep him awake. The lights on the monitors around him didn't really help the effect, though. And Katie was hovering in the dark, like she was waiting for a reaction.

"Cool." Peter said.

He took a deep, tremulous breath.

And a surge of nausea overwhelmed him.

It didn't sting quite like the other times had. Drugs or dissociation, he wasn't sure. The pain seemed distant, too far removed from his understanding of his body to feel real. Katie shoved a pink emesis basin onto his lap, the second he started gagging. He watched beige vomit slop across the bottom of it, and felt nothing but vague, detached, disgust.

Then something bunched up behind his back teeth.

A tide of revulsion brought him sharply back to reality. Over and over he retched, his entire body straining to rid itself of the obstruction. He crammed his fingers into his mouth, sending shivers down his spine as his teeth grazed the raw skin.

His fingers found purchase, on the slippery surface of the thing fluttering against his tongue. He pulled. There was a sharp pain behind his clavicle, like a hangnail tugged too far, and the flap of skinlike something became a film across his teeth. There was elasticity to the thing. It stretched instead of coming free, and it _hurt_.

Peter's entire life right now seemed to be finding new types of pain to be in.

At last, the strip snapped, and half came away in his hand. It was a murky, translucent white, bubbles of brown-tinted saliva clinging to the insides of its folds. One end was tinged red with blood. It looked _wrong,_ alien, unlike anything that had ever been associated with his body.

Tearing it out didn't help, though.

Because suddenly, he couldn't breathe.

This wasn't like the gasping tightness of a panic attack, or anything else familiar. It was reminiscent of strangulation- the way it got worse and worse, how his vision blurred- but different in one horrible way. Strangulation came with the caveat of hands, tools, something real and outside to pull away from. This was like having his throat crushed, from the inside out.

It hurt to claw at his throat but the action was instinctive. The only thing that mattered was getting _air_.

He very abruptly became something to be handled. Tried to squirm away from the intrusion of hands on his body, twist to a position that would bring some sort of respite. Alarms sang as the screaming of his spider-sense reached a crescendo, the tactile sensation of a brush with death. Black blotches began to swell into his vision. Someone was speaking,trying to soothe him, but the words swam together into a soft-toned slurry at the edge of perception.

He caught one last muffled snippet of speech before he was jabbed with a sedative and the world began to fade out. The words were dulled, like the rest of it, but slow enough for him to parse them.

"Just like Erskine and Scott."


	19. Chapter 19

Kamala had been… summoned.

That was the best term for it.

She was trying really hard not to be annoyed about it.

It wasn't that she didn't understand her position here. She was of incredibly small scale compared to the rest of them. But these big, powerful people seemed a little too willing to snap their shiny red fingers and expect her to comply. There were things going on in her city, outside of their big-apple bubble. Shootouts that didn't involve bullets; people being phased through space, explosions of blue light on the horizon.

It felt like the entire eastern seaboard was the target. Like this would just keep on spreading.

She tugged her gloves into place. Hooked the straps of the disposable face mask over her ears.

War Machine had landed outside her house and pretty much said she had to come.

Because Spider-Man was at the point where they started giving you everything you wanted.

Stepping into the isolation room felt like stepping out of the world.

Spider-Man's nurse—a blonde woman, serving as a smiling psychopomp—shut the door behind her.

Everything in the room was colourless. White walls. White bedding. White blinds over the window, and harsh white lights, as if the architecture itself was judging her. The soft blues and oranges of the blanket Spider-Man had swaddled himself in seemed violently saturated in comparison. To her relief, he'd kept the teddy bear she'd bought him. It was propped against the headboard.

The TV was on but there was no sound, and it took her a moment to realise that Spider-Man was listening through headphones, the cord plugged into the remote attached to his bed. His eyes were fixed on the screen, wine-dark and sunken. There was little contrast between his skin and the sheets.

"Hello?" Kamala asked the glassy-eyed boy in the bed.

Spider-Man started, then looked up at her, and squinted like he couldn't quite make her out.

"Hey," he said. He took off his headphones, minimising contact between the cables and his fingers. "I- I need you to do something for me. But! But, uh first turn off the lights! I wanna show you something."

Kamala did so, and there was a brief rustling of blankets before a bubble of blue light spread from the recognisable mesh of webbing. The pattern Tony'd been working on.

"Oh, that's cool ," she said . The attempt at nonchalance should, rightfully, have fallen flat on its face. She was pretty sure it had; that her friend was still aware enough to play along.

Leaning a little closer, she could make out the dark spaces on the brace. It had the airs of minimalist architecture- overdramatic, elegant arcs and a glut of negative space.

"I know, right?" Spider-Man said. "Watch-"

He pressed a button near the top, and the light got brighter each time he thumbed it. The area of bandaging on his hands had expanded; overtaking all but four fingertips on his right hand, and the entirety of his left palm.

"That's awesome," Kamala said. She flicked the light back on. "Okay, uh- what did you want me to do?

Spider-Man took a deep breath, like he was about to do something awful.

"Help me with this library app thing?"

Kamala blinked a couple times, and stared dumbly at the tablet he was gesturing to, before, with the speed and grace of a computer from the 50s, she put two and two together.

"Oh, you want me to-" she picked up the tablet, and caught herself before she completed the churlish sentence with 'be your hands'

"Yeah." Spider-Man picked at the tube taped to his face, and Kamala tried to avoid watching him do it. He sounded awful, like it hurt him to be speaking. "There should be, uh, a study in there. Somewhere. By, uh, Erskine and Scott. Probably... probably about the stuff that made Captain America be, like, Captain America."

Kamala dutifully typed away.

Abraham Erskine. The man who'd made Captain America.

The article she turned up was from before then. The thirties. When Captain America had yet to exist.

Spider-Man waited while the PDF loaded, absently chewing on his nails.

"Are you sure we're allowed to be reading this?" Kamala asked, when she got her first glimpse of the abstract. "It doesn't seem like we'd be allowed to read this."

Spider-Man answered with a harsh bark of a laugh.

"Yesterday," he said, bitterly. "I was literally puking my guts out. It doesn't matter if we're allowed . I wanna know why."

"Wait, you were what ?" Kamala almost dropped the tablet.

"Not like, all of them."

"No, no," Kamala pressed, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "You don't get to just say-" 

"Esophageal lining," he answered, scrubbing at his eyes with the inside of his wrist. "They- I had an, an endoscopy- they put a camera down my throat- and they said it's the lining of my esophagus."

"Oh…" Kamala said, feeling guilty. Taking a crack at the tension. "Is that really guts?"

"It's part of the gut," Spider-Man mumbled. "Like, in biology? They say it's… uh…"

He lost the thread of the sentence, coughing wetly.

Kamala skimmed the abstract.

It didn't look promising.

"Do you want me to...read it to you?" Spider-Man just shrugged in response. Clearly, Kamala shouldn't have kept him talking.

She'd never seen someone so powerful brought to such a low before.

She picked up at the start of the abstract.

"There have been numerous attempts to replicate the original serum used on Captain America," she began. The text was arranged in two columns, because researchers didn't like their readership, apparently. "However, few of these attempts have been successful. This report collects and describes such failures, with the intent of preventing-"

Kamala was interrupted by a soft, wet, sucking sound, like a shoe being peeled from a sticky floor.

She looked up.

Spider-Man still had his fingernail in his mouth. Delicately clenched between too-white incisors.

The hand it'd been attached to was clenching a fistful of his baby-blue gown. Shaking.

Kamala could smell blood.

A gluey, dark-red layer of it coated the bottom of the shed fingernail, in the places where it hadn't taken part of the nail bed with it.

Spider-Man reached up, removed the nail from between his teeth. He didn't look nearly as disgusted as he should have- he was staring at this wayward sliver of his body with something that looked almost like disinterest. His hands betrayed him, though. His left hand was shaking so hard that he seemed on the verge of dropping the fingernail.

"Is-" Kamala struggled to find words that wouldn't make her sound like an idiot or an asshat. Disgust was thick in her voice; pressing at her gag reflex and making the words sound choked, heavy. "Is that supposed to happen? Because that- just guessing here- but that doesn't seem like something that should happen."

Spider-Man placed the peeled-off nail on the arm table, and shrugged his shoulders. There was a bump where his collarbone had been broken, bulging under stretched-thin skin.

"Keep going," he said.

God, what the hell was happening to him?

Later, Kamala would wish that she never found out.

The article was a dense block of scientific language and forties-isms, and it took Kamala a while to slog through each sentence. She kept her eyes firmly trained on the text, because she didn't want to consider the alternatives.

It didn't help.

At first, it didn't seem horrendous- the first couple case studies in the cluster only failed to do what they were supposed to; produced people weaker than Captain America, with a distinct lack of superhuman strength or less endurance. But after those, it got darker. More depressing. More relevant.

When such an enhancement failed in a particular way, Kamala realized, too late to hold back the news, there were a few standout symptoms.

Slow loss of strength as the body began to degrade. Immunodeficiency. Then creeping, widespread necrosis, neural changes, and death. Fig. 4 on the second page showed a grainy image of a brain riddled with holes, shrunken at the edges, where the corruption of natural processes had made it degenerate.

Spider-Man seemed unnervingly calm about it. He stared at the shed nail on the table, eyebrows furrowed, but didn't speak or cry. He seemed more annoyed about potentially dying than actually afraid. Kamala wondered if this was even news to him. 'I almost die every day' , he'd said.

He couldn't heal like she did. Maybe he'd already accepted that this was going to kill him.

"That's... disheartening," he concluded, after Kamala had gone through enough of the article that she needed to stop. His eyes were shining; he was caught in the tension just before the onset of tears.

Maybe it was selfish, but Kamala couldn't help but be irritated by the timing: he was going to die just as she was getting attached. Just as she'd got the chance to know him. If the article was right, and so many of the symptoms seemed to match, he'd be the first Avenger to go.

Kamala clenched her teeth.

They didn't both need to be miserable.

"Sorry," she said, like that would change anything.

Spider-Man blinked briefly, staring into space. Kamala wondered just how drugged up he was.

"No, no, I-" he took a shaky breath. "They didn't tell me. I heard them talking about it and they didn't even tell me. That's- fuck ."

He seemed to finally grasp the gravity of the situation. Tears shone in his eyes as he slumped back against his pillows.

"Maybe they didn't tell you because it's something else?" Kamala was making Spider-Man cry, and he couldn't cry, because if he cried she would cry and nobody needed to deal with that sort of feedback loop, not right now.

"No, just... I'm a lot like Captain America. In... ways. Sort of. A little." Spider-Man seemed to put a lot of effort into the semi-coherent sentence; Kamala had pushed him that far. "Medically relevant ways. And- I can't die. That can't happen to me. Jesus fuck, it'd kill my a- it'd kill Tony. Oh, god, Tony-"

He ripped off another nail.

"Okay," Kamala said. "I'm gonna get somebody-"

"No!" Spider-Man grabbed for her arm, and despite everything, she could feel the strength there. His grip made her intensely aware that those thin fingers could crush her bones. "You can't. You can't tell anyone we read that. I'm already in a lot of trouble."

Kamla was about to argue, when his eyes left her. The fingers around her wrist went limp.

She followed his gaze.

New York City, on TV. Queens, to be precise.

He shifted forwards, sitting completely upright. Focusing on the screen.

Cameras, helicopter-mounted to catch all of the spectacle, circled the scene.

Spider-Man unplugged his headphones. A girl in a fluorescent pink hoodie was sent pinwheeling into the air, and fell, her hair a dark streak against the smokey blue of the sky.

"With this being the third attack on the area in as many weeks," the newscaster said, sounding as depressed as she legally could on prime-time tv, "the inhabitants of Flushing are left to wonder: where is their Spider-Man?"

The sound was abruptly muted, but Kamala didn't look away. She couldn't. A man in yellow was carving through the streets with what looked like concussive blasts. He'd punch into the air, then a wide angle of the area in front of him would topple.

"Fuck," Spider-Man murmured. Finally, the crying started, a flood of tears dripping down his hollow cheeks. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck ."

It was almost a relief, seeing it all hit him. The horror of waiting for him to realise was over.

Kamala pulled back, sliding her hand into his. He winced at the contact, but didn't let go. The fingers of his free hand scratched at the tape on his face, leaving smears of blood across his skin.

"Fuck," Kamala agreed, trying to ignore the continued self-mutilation.

"I might not remember this," suddenly, she was the focus of his attention again. "With- because of- all the drugs and shit, I don't know- I- I might not remember this. There's...gaps. But thanks for telling me." Every word sounded like a struggle, between hitching, half-sobbed breaths. "You're the only person here who doesn't treat me like a baby."

Kamala forced a smile. Watched the orange glow of the screen spill across his skin. Interlocked their fingers, blue glove and bone-white puffy bandages.

Never in her life had she been more desperate to be wrong.

Her heart ached.

"You're welcome."


	20. Chapter 20

Peter woke to the smell of rotting meat.

His head ached, tremendously. The painful pressure had been building for the past few days, ramping up as the upper-respiratory nonsense did, and now it had peaked, as if his body quite literally beginning to fall apart wasn't enough.

Everything hurt.

Sitting upright made him feel like someone was trying to push his brain out through his nose, but lying down was worse. The smell got noticeably stronger, sticking in the back of his throat like cigarette smoke. Peter was almost overwhelmed by the urge to gag, but he didn't want to risk throwing up. There'd been the sickly scent of a bad infection before, but nothing like this.

There was ahorrible sweet edge to the acrid stench, like a mixture of molasses and curdled milk. Peter swallowed hard. He'd been on a continuous feed for the past twelve hours, and puking now would put him in a world of trouble. He couldn't afford to lose the calories, and they'd probably think he'd done it on purpose. He didn't even feel particularly sick- just _repulsed_.

And he couldn't work out where it was coming from. It was thick in the air, palpable- and seemed to completely consume the space, pressing in from all directions. This wasn't even the kind of thing spider-sense warned him against- basic human instinct did. His ancestors wouldn't have survived if they didn't avoid the smell of something dead.

It wasn't until he pressed the corner of his blanket over his mouth and nose that he began to put two and two together.

Filtering his air supply made the smell get _worse_.

Peter squeezed his eyes shut, let his head fall forwards, even though it hurt. He didn't want to believe the stomach-twisting truth he'd just worked out.

In response to the movement, there was a sudden sensation of release- the ache on the left side of his face began to fade, and he realised that it was really important that he got the blanket away.

Sure enough, seconds later, a tepid trickle of fluid oozed down through his unoccupied nostril. The viscosity suggested the clotting aftermath of a nosebleed, but he knew that he wasn't getting off that easy.

The smell was overwhelming.

When he drew away the hand instinct had pressed to his face, he could feel the strange stickiness of it, tacky between his fingers. He opened his eyes.

The thick, clumpy fluid clinging to his fingers wasn't blood.

It was a soupy, swirled black, streaked through with other colours. His spider-sense flared like a fire alarm.

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

He knew, in his sinking heart, what that was. Where the evidence pointed.

But he wasn't Captain America, not quite. Maybe there were differences. Maybe there was hope. Some of Scott's subjects had survived.

Peter deliberated for a second. Even with something awful oozing from his face, he didn't want to risk the human contact medical care demanded. And he didn't really trust the humans he'd be in contact with- they hadn't told him anything. Just how long had they been watching him follow the same path as the people in that literature review?

He picked at the skin around his ng tube, and was surprised to find scabbed-over scratches. In the crease of his elbows, familiar fissures were forming.

Dark dots began to spot the sheet across his lap. He needed to do something, but the thrumming of his headache was cavorting with the edge of panic, and it paralysed him. He couldn't bring someone else in here- he couldn't be seen like this; being seen like this meant more tests, more touch, more, intolerably more- and he didn't want that.

Was it worth it?

He looked up, felt the slither of something into the back of his throat. Coughed the foul taste into his mouth. Gagged up more. He wondered briefly where it correlated to- what part of his insides were gooily gracing his fingers and tongue.

This was a skin-crawling, visceral sort of wrong, but… it didn't hurt. Not at all. As it went on, the throbbing pain in his head slowly began to ease.

Everything else had been _painful_. This was just… ominous.

It was a sign that he was dying.

There was a faint hiss, reverberating through the bones on the right side of his skull, and a spine-tinglingly strong rush of relief. The tube interfered, though- the stinking slurry clogged that side of his nose, then escaped down his throat. He was still hacking up splashes of it when his nurse came in.

"Oh, dear," Lauren said, with the taught sort of cheeriness that belied panic. "That doesn't look good."

"It doesn't _look_ good," Peter agreed. Using his voice was a mistake. The ordinary scratchiness of speaking with a sore throat would have been bad enough, but now, a filmy bubble of fluid formed between his tonsils, burst into his mouth.

He spat hot, putrid black.

"Can you just…." he dragged a hand across his mouth, a futile attempt at looking less catastrophic. He should have been panicking- the fact that he wasn't was...worrying. "Go?"

"I'm really sorry, hon," Lauren said, moving closer. It seemed almost predatory; like the motion of a cat about to strike. "But we can't just leave you like this. And I need to take your vitals, too…"

"Do you really need to?" Peter pushed himself upright, and away, tugging at the stitches from his second laparotomy. The wound hadn't healed as well as the first- the movement still stung. A small, sensible part of his brain protested the denial- this was very, very bad. "Like, _really_?"

"I know, it's awful," Lauren said, all sympathy. He could tell she was grateful for the mask; beneath it, her nose wrinkled. "When did that start?"

"I dunno," he managed with a shrug. "Fifteen minutes?"

Lauren frowned.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But this is going to keep you busy for a while…"

It wasn't like Peter didn't know this was coming. He just wished it hadn't been so fast- that he'd had a moment of peace to prepare for the onslaught. Lauren alone was on the edge of tolerable; he didn't have the energy for another round of swabs and scans and blood tests, even if that was the only reasonable option right now.

"But..." he couldn't find a decent excuse. Sweat pricked up on the back of his neck; worse than it was from just the fever.

Like the filament in a dying lightbulb, something snapped. The odd, precarious feeling he'd had since yesterday came to a head. The rational edge he'd been working off of began to crumble.

"Please." It sounded pathetic when he said it but that didn't matter. The time for shame was over. "Don't- just, don't make me. I can't- this isn't hurting me, I don't need anything-"

Lauren at least had the grace to look sorry. Peter couldn't have managed it in her place.

"None of it will hurt."

There wasn't enough oxygen in the air, suddenly- Peter struggled for a deep breath of it, through the reek and congestion. It seemed like he couldn't take a full breath regardless- as if his sternum was pinned to his spine.

He'd never wanted to be alone so bad in his life. Alone and at home. So he could curl up somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and not have to feel this anymore.

"No," he croaked. Blackness sputtered around the tube in his nose. "What even- what _is_ this? It doesn't feel dangerous!"

This was a losing battle. It shouldn't have taken effort to convince himself that his situation was awful, and indicative of everything getting worse. The sensible sections of his mind were screaming against this, but nothing else so far had made him feel better.

"We can talk through everything first, if you want." Lauren's voice was soft and soothing, and made Peter want to physically escape. He felt scrutinised, almost, judged by her proximity alone- the discomfort was like standing next to a bonfire. If he could just get away, out of the situation, he'd be okay- or at least, not this bad.

"Hey, it's okay," she soothed. "Breathe with me."

There was a brief moment of Lauren counting and Peter shakily following along, struggling to avoid choking. The hyperventilation was a risk, he realised. He'd drag the fluid back into his lungs. The thought of it rotting there made him want to vomit.

More testing happened anyway. More _hands_ ; the prickling pain of too much touch. The stinging smell of peppermint oil, dabbed on people's masks, leeched out into the air to join the screaming whirr of electric equipment. Awkward positioning, to let the fluid ooze out into sample tools or a papery kidney dish.

Every point of contact was painful, radiating through him like a sound wave through a plucked string. When he was allowed to, he pressed his hands over his ears, to cut out just a little bit of the input. Every room was assessed through the slivers of light he could bear, between his eyelashes. There was something like comfort in knowing the escape routes, even though he had no chance of getting to use them.

He'd never had a worse experience. A symphony of anxiety and overstimulation was drowning out his ability to reason- to _think-_ and it was all he could do to keep his hands at his sides, not pushing back against anything, not hurting anyone. A part of him wished he'd brought the teddy bear Ms Marvel gave him- at least that would have kept his hands busy.

He'd never been afraid of hospitals until he got here.

It seemed like an eternity before he got back to the relative peace of his room. The air smelled different; a stagnant, citrusy mirror of scent he'd woken up to. It reminded him of the undertones in certain cleaning chemicals- acidic and unnatural.

But Lauren was gone, at least. He was alone, and there was bliss in that, even though he was alone watching black slime drip from his body into a disposable paper kidney dish.

He was going to die. Probably soon.

It didn't bother him as much as it should have. He was too distracted, his mind a mire from all the drugs- all he could focus on was the relief of it. The glorious absence of pain, yet to be infringed on by the rest of his body. He'd had euphoria like this before, coupled with the taste of blood in his mouth and spots of blackness in his vision. The body's last-ditch attempt at motivating him to go on.

They hadn't told him. That was the thing.

A small pool of black gunk had accumulated in the corner of the kidney dish. Peter coughed, and a particularly thick strand of it folded into his mouth. He had to pull it out with his fingers.

He examined the clot, stringing it between his fingers and trying to fight back the revulsion. There were streaks of something off-white and especially pungent. They were planning yet another surgery, to clean out the inside of his sinuses.

He scraped off his fingers on the kidney dish.

He'd planned his funeral, sort of. Somewhere in his room there was a notebook, with a disparate mess of preferences- things like _don't like lilies_ and _small ceremony_. It didn't seem real enough to act on. None of this did.

Nobody had said it to his face. They'd tell him, if he was right.

Wouldn't they?

It wasn't like it mattered, anyway. He wasn't coming back from this- not completely.

Someone knocked on the door, and Peter's entire body went tense. Crushing hopelessness flooded in- more people, more noise, here to grate against the rawness of his senses.

He wondered, briefly, if he was being punished.

The door opened, revealing not an anonymous member of the medical staff, but a familiar face.

Natasha.

"Can you talk right now?" she asked. Her voice was low, somehow managing to be soft without being condescending.

Unlike most of the other people Peter had seen that day, she didn't react to the smell.

"About what?" Peter knew how repulsive he was, right now- Natasha didn't deserve to deal with that. It wasn't like he'd benefit from her pity.

"That answers my question," she said. "Do you like chess?"

Peter shrugged. The idea of playing _board games_ right now seemed frivolous enough as to be irrelevant.

This would probably be his last game.

Natasha unfolded a full size chessboard, and tapped it on the arm table twice. A blue hologram of thirty-two pieces flickered into place.

"Which side would you like to play?" she asked.

"I don't care," Peter mumbled.

Would it really matter? It wasn't like he could be Spider-Man after this- his healing still hadn't picked back up, and it seemed stupid to even bank of _survival_ at this point, let alone recovery.

"Okay," Natasha said. She made a show of demonstrating concern, in furrowed eyebrows and a slight downwards arc to her mouth. "C four."

The her holographic pawn flickered, and reappeared two squares across the board.

"C, uh, five." Peter answered. He watched his pawn mirror the move, through half-lidded eyes. "Nat, am I gonna die?"

"We're all gonna die," she said. "D four. But you? Of this? Probably not."

It wasn't very reassuring. Because she didn't know.

Peter sighed.

Maybe it would be better if this was all just over, instead of being dragged grotesquely out - those sorts of deaths were worse for the mourners, too.

"Nat," he mumbled, theatrically scrubbing the heel of his bandaged hand across his eyes, "I think I'm too tired for chess."


	21. Chapter 21

May spent a moment staring at her phone after hanging up.

More surgery.

She leaned against the wall, taking a moment to breathe deep the too-cool office air.

Exploratory surgery, to be exact. The smoke to the growing fire of uncertainty- with each new symptom, things unraveled further. The initial diagnosis became a little more divorced from reality.

Peter hated anesthesia. He always had, even before it became so…chancy. The first time he'd ever been put under, when he was eight years old and getting teeth out, he'd cried the whole way home. He didn't like the fuzzy, disconnected feeling, the way it slowed him down.

Now, with the uncertainty brought on by the uncharted nuances of his biology, it must have been a million times worse.

It had been four days since she'd seen him.

Superhumans were secretive - they had to be. The world was full of people who were desperate to exploit their power. But that didn't make it feel any better- how little time she was allowed with him, because of how little time she was allowed on the premises.

They were still settling on a story- because they'd willingly admitted to having no clue what the recovery time would be like. So far, they could excuse him from life for about six weeks.

It might be more than six weeks.

Something snapped in that moment. It wasn't a matter of things becoming too much- things had always been too much. It was a matter of losing patience.

Forty-five minutes later, she was pulling up outside their apartment.

When she'd last seen Mary- when they all had- she'd promised to keep Peter safe.

May knew in a rational, logical way, that she wasn't omniscient. She couldn't control the whims of criminals, or tear down the rules of biology, as much as she wanted to.

But she could have stopped him.

There had been so many chances to say no. After she'd caught him in the suit, after her first battle of a discussion with Tony Stark- so many times she could have done something, anything, other than accepting that this was the safest route- every bit of the danger and destruction, but with her kept in the loop.

Her hands were shaking; it was difficult to get her key in the lock.

She had to do something . At very least try to make a dent. Peter had never been through anything like this before, and he was completely alone out there, in one of the most distressingly designed places on the planet.

Driving back to the city after each visit went against her every instinct.

There was very little that fit within the bounds of infection control. The isolation room meant isolation from everything, including most of his possessions.

Gloves and socks, because Peter needed the help to keep warm, even in a heated room. He was sick to the point of reduced circulation; at first from poor perfusion, and then from the starvation alone. The last time she'd touched him, everything past his elbows had been freezing.

May paused halfway to the door, then grabbed a plastic tub of gelato from the freezer and crammed it into a cooler bag. It'd been for Peter's birthday, originally- but that didn't really matter, now.

The drive was a very, very long one.

They'd told her that a top priority right now was getting Peter eating again. They still weren't on solid ground with him in terms of enteral nutrition, mostly because his caloric needs were all over the place. They were pushing more calories into him than an adult with his abilities would have needed, and the weight loss had barely plateaued. This wasn't even a typical case of anorexia, or the malabsorption they'd suspected after the first surgery. This was something that didn't make sense.

When she made it to the facility, May moved through a ritual that had become almost automatic, now. Her fingerprints and retinas were scanned, and one of numerous anonymous agents used their key card to swipe her through a series of key-lock doors.

She tied her hair back and put on the gloves and gown before tucking the strings of the surgical mask behind her ears with the gravity of a knight lowering their visor.

At very least, she looked prepared. There was something almost soothing in it; the protection of a layer of infection control. Knowing that if nothing else, she couldn't make things worse .

Breaching the seal of the isolation room brought the hum of machinery and airflow, the claustrophobia of quarantine. Her heart rate picked up.

She wondered if this was how gladiators felt, stepping onto the sand of the arena.

Peter was sleeping. He looked deceptively peaceful, one hand splayed beside his head on the pillow, his lips slightly parted.

And tinged, faintly, blue.

There was no way to distract from it, the tubes and wires that seemed to cocoon him. They'd switched out the bp cuff- this new one was purple rather than blue, and sized smaller. The plastic rails on the bed were up, on both sides, enclosing him completely. Three skinned streaks were beginning to scab on his cheek. He looked different. Worse. Thinner and paler, every time. Like she was losing him, inch by inch.

May took a seat in the chair beside the bed, and tried not to focus on how little he still looked. The traces she could still see of the toddler he'd been when they'd adopted him.

She missed their lives before this, the safety of routine; when his world had existed between school and their apartment and the library, when she could still protect him. There was too much information kept off limits now- by Stark, and SHIELD, and everyone else- for her to do the same.

There had been a time when she could hold him, completely, in her arms.

His hair was damp- curling, cherubic, without the effort he normally made to style it- plastered to his forehead with sweat. She reached out to brush it away-

Peter's eyes snapped open. He flinched back from her hand, like he expected to be hit.

"Hi, honey." May clenched her hands in her lap, out of his personal bubble. She tried to smile, like the horror of this wasn't crushing her chest in.

Peter didn't respond for a moment, his eyes darting wildly around the room, horribly, starkly vacant. Eventually- after what seemed like too long, but was maybe ten seconds in reality- they settled on her. He relaxed, and after a moment, managed a shaky smile.

"May," he mumbled. He tried to blink the sleep out of his eyes, moved to rub them- then let his bandaged hand fall back against his pillowcase. It must hurt too much. "I missed you."

"I missed you too, sweetie," May said. "How are things going? Are people still being mean?"

The staff here were a cold sort of caring- nothing like the pediatric wards Peter was used to. They were all agents, first and foremost. Professional. Not cruel.

There was an irony in it, almost. Seeing his life saved, by people who had almost certainly killed.

Peter made a vague sound of agreement.

"I don't like it here," he said softly. With great effort, he pushed himself upright. "May-" he ran a hand through his hair, pausing briefly to scratch at a place just above his ear. "I wanna go home ."

That was new.

"Why?" May asked. Panic, briefly, gripped her. It was hard enough when he was compliant- when it was just the dissatisfaction of illness; when they could both accept that it was all necessary. "They're helping you get better, here-"

Peter grabbed a fistful of her disposable isolation gown, the papery yellow fabric slipping from his shaky grip. Tears welled in his eyes.

"I want to go home to die." It was the single most coherent sentence he had said in ages. "Just give me that ."

"Peter, what-" May shook her head. "You're not dying . They've been telling me everything, Petey, and you're going to be fine. It'll just...take a little while."

God, how long had he been thinking that? Why hadn't he told her?

Who had put that thought in his head? Was this nightmarish process painful enough to feel deadly?

"Who told you that?"

"I-" Peter scratched at the same patch of skin above his ear. "I read a study." He didn't seem to realise how that sounded. "They don't tell me anything, May."

Anger bloomed in her chest. She'd trusted these people; they were supposed to do better than this.

He'd probably been counting down . Believing that this wouldn't get better- it would just be over. A whole new type of agony, heaped on top of everything else. No wonder his mental health was suffering. 

"Well…" she began, "I don't know what you read about, but they'd tell you. If they didn't I'd tell you. I promise."

"I'm...you know about Captain America?" Peter slumped back against his pillows.

"Man out of time, former Avenger," May said, trying to seem stable. "He also hit you. So I'm not a fan."

"I'm kinda like Captain America," Peter said, his voice strained. "This," he made a vague gesture to himself, "T-this is what it looks like when Captain America goes wrong."

With that, he began to lapse out of lucidity. She could see it in his eyes, the exhaustion and intoxication beginning to take him over again.

In her bag, the ice cream was probably melting.

"That's not what's happening to you," she affirmed. May let herself succumb to instinct, a hand on his shoulder, the other stroking through his hair. "I promise you, you're going to be okay."

He wavered, then, slumping into her, resting his head on her shoulder. Peter was warm, far too warm- the antipyretics weren't working. A quirk of his biology, the result of skirting the line between effectiveness and caution- they didn't quite know where the safe limits were, so they tended not to test them.

Maybe that was why. Maybe they just couldn't stop it hurting.

"It makes so much sense," he whined. He sounded almost disappointed, but mostly dazed. "You don't understand, if- if you'd read it- its by Erskine and Scott-"

He just wanted this to make sense.

They all did.

"I'm going to talk to your nurse," May said, into the salt-smelling fluff of his hair. "And they'll explain everything, okay?"

Peter whined in frustration, and wrapped his arms around her.

"Don't go," he said. It was a horribly familiar tone. It took her back to returning to work, eleven years ago- the first time she'd left after Mary had died. When Peter was too little to understand. "Don't leave me."

"I won't, I won't." May lied, rubbing small, soothing circles in the hollow space between his jutting shoulder blades. "I'm staying."

She would leave eventually; she always did- because they hadn't pushed things through the bureaucratic pipeline fast enough, because she needed to keep her job, because she had to trust these strangers. There was nobody else to trust.

"I brought you ice cream," she offered, pulling back. "The kind you really like."

Peter's face fell.

"Oh," he mumbled. "Could... I think they have a freezer here? I'm super tired."

He looked like he'd been caught sneaking home late. Guilty.

"Okay." May folded, because she just couldn't force herself to cause a confrontation. Peter couldn't take that, right now. "But later. You have to."

Peter nodded.

They still had no clue why he was doing this. Normally there was a logic to self-starvation, even if it was nonsensical logic. Peter couldn't give a reason. The only thing the psych team had accomplished so far was making him cry.

"Did you bring my book?" he asked. May nodded, and found it in her tote. The choice seemed...morbid.

It was an old thing, the pages starting to go yellow. It had been Richard's, first.

Kafka wasn't exactly uplifting, but it might be distracting enough to help. May put on her glasses, struggling at first to turn the pages with gloved fingers, and began to read aloud.

Peter was asleep by the bottom of the second page.

Their conversations were all like this. Short, intense, and absolutely futile.

May paused for a moment, watching the gentle cycle of his breathing. Appreciating that he was breathing, and breathing on his own- being so unwell, even that was uncertain.

She left the socks- thick, fluffy things, that could be slid on over compression stockings and the brace- on the arm table along with his gloves, and slipped out. Back into the real world, where there was colour and bright light and movement. She had an obligation to ask that they give him more information, and she focused on that. If she hadn't, she wouldn't have left the room at all.

Once she had chased down and chewed out the correct members of staff, May felt a little bit lost. She was consumed by the need to help - but what Peter needed right now was rest, and time, and there was nothing she could do to make it better.

Once she'd left the ice cream in the freezer, and moved on to other things, the hulk bought her coffee.

May was sitting in their closest approximation of a waiting room, trying to coordinate with Peter's school. It had been long enough- almost three weeks, now- that they needed a reintegration plan for when he went back. The initial car-crash cover story made enough sense for most of it- the long absence and the scars- but there were new symptoms to cover.

"Hi." She looked up to the source of the voice. "I'm abusing my avenger privileges to get nice coffee. Do you want a cup?"

A decade hadn't changed Bruce Banner much- there was still enough of the gangling postgrad she'd initially met to be familiar.

"Sure," she said, forcing a smile.

Bruce was one of the people she trusted, sort of. She'd tangentially known him through Richard. It was a strange sort of bond that had faded- they had shared sparse moments at weddings and funerals, and never progressed beyond small talk. Now, she mostly knew him in the context of a continued effort to understand Peter's physiology, providing resources for the research Peter wanted done.

"Is it like this for all of you?" she asked, when Bruce returned with two steaming white mugs. She noted that they both took their coffee black. "So… uncertain?"

Bruce mulled over that for a moment, tapping his fingers on the ceramic of his cup.

"Not...well, I don't want to say uncertain ." he said. "But for me...generally, yes. But I heal when I hulk out, so it's not so much of a problem in my case."

"How can you be sure, then?" May asked. She took a sip of her coffee, burned her tongue. "That any given treatment will work?"

It was terrifying, even as an outsider.

She couldn't imagine how awful it must be when your own body was the mystery.

"We don't." Bruce blew on his coffee, sending a small plume of steam up from the cup. "But nobody ever does, really. There's never a hundred percent chance of success. Most of the time, you just follow standard procedure and hope for the best." he tested the coffee, tilting the cup so the liquid touched his lips, and found it too hot. "Honestly, Peter can be easier, in that respect. We know where the biggest gaps are."

A brief silence.

"He thinks he's dying," May said softly. Her frame couldn't contain the pain of it; she hunched in on herself and clutched her mug. "Because of some… study he read."

"Google scholar still falls under the jurisdiction of doctor google," Bruce said, his tone careful. "He's just… looking for answers. People do that, when their bodies do things science can't explain." He was carrying the conversation for her. Avoiding pushing her to effort. "I know I did. What study, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Erskine and Scott," May said. "Whatever is in it reallyupset him. I've.. never heard of it, in all honesty."

Bruce frowned.

"I have. That's not… publically available. I don't think he'd normally have access to that," he said. "But there's probably a hard copy in our library here. I could talk you through it, if you like." he made a vague gesture with his cup, the dark contents sloshing dangerously close to the edge. "Disprove it."

"Okay." May said, with a jerky nod. "That's. That would be...good."

Without complaint, she let Bruce lead her to the library, a place that smelled of old paper and clean carpet. Let him talk through the inconsistencies, the reasons Captain America, and the tragic prototypes of him, were nothing like her son. Listened to the highlighting- the mania Peter wasn't suffering, the deadened senses they'd seen none of. Let herself be reassured.

But she wasn't blind to body language.

She had picked up on the tension in his stance and the slight, suppressed urgency in the way he moved. The words broke over her like waves viewed from the seabed- distant, disconnected things. She clung to the logic in each discounting sentence, tried to stop herself from seeing the similarities.

Bruce's fingers were tense. Almost to the point of shaking. He summarised paragraphs, rather than reading aloud.

It all suggested one terrible thing.

A sliver of a half-percent of a chance, that maybe, in this nightmare of a world, Peter could be right.


	22. Chapter 22

Tony had read through the study.

Bruce hadn't wanted him to, because apparently mid-century biology was too much for a man who could memorise a discipline in a day.

It had been painful . Every page was a new blow.

Tony shifted in his seat. It had stopped feeling invasive, watching Peter sleep— there was a point where privacy started to seem redundant, because Peter had no chance at it anyway. Tony had been in hospital before, and you were lucky to make it seventy-two hours without the entire staff seeing your arse.

He'd been given peppermint oil to dab on his mask, and the smell lent a certain surreality to the scene.

He was running through the notes in his head, waiting for Peter to wake up— repeating those failures in his memory like a mantra. There were so many signs— so many parallels.

There had been a picture of someone's palm, and the pale rind of flesh that had sheathed free of it.

It all looked so frighteningly familiar. That was the worst part. Recognising things. Drawing the lines.

Men— boys, really, with a few years on Peter, if that— had died like this, or in the aftermath of this. There were descriptions and diagrams, pictures— people tangled in convulsions; blood seeping through skin as it began to break down— the stuff of nightmares.

There had been a picture of a brain. A cross-section, the post-mortem dissection of one of the patients. The brain had been a young one—a few minutes with a textbook, and Tony'd learnt the markers— but atrophied, like one several times older and blighted with something. The text had been impossible to get through. They'd lost that subject, denominated DG, over time. Flickering lapses in memory, shell-shocked anxiety, and then the big changes. Slipping motor control, the slow loss of balance as the cerebellum went.

He needed to talk to Peter about it. Reassure him that this wasn't the same thing.

Empathy didn't come easy, right now.

Because—god, it was all just so scary, so completely outside of his wheelhouse. He didn't have a script , anymore. He didn't have a plan. Normally, he could work out how to fix things, or at very least improve them.

Peter's eyelids fluttered.

He hadn't been sleeping well. May seemed to be the only one who could calm him down enough. Once he was out, though, he was out , and that gave him the energy to stare into space and be horribly anxious for thirty-six straight hours.

Tony rehearsed his talking points, and waited for the kid to wake up.

Peter stirred slightly, the pace of his breathing picking up. He opened his eyes, blinking vacantly, and looked towards Tony.

Then, arching his back off the bed and clenching his hands into fists, he screamed.

It was not a normal sound. Tony spent enough time on battlefields with the kid to recognise the sound he made when wounded, and this was not it. There was no restraint , none of the composure Peter clung to in the heat of action. this was different, desperate, like an animal that had been shot.

And it didn't stop . Melancholy melted into cold, quick terror in Tony's veins as Peter thrashed , bandaged hands scrabbling at the wires leading to his chest. The screaming grew louder, higher in pitch, until it collapsed into rough, rasping sobs.

Peter found the wires, grasped, but only managed to pull away one of the leads.

His eyes were wide open.

Alarms began to ring. The bleeping pulse ox, the trill of disconnected cardiac leads. Tony punched the nurse-call button.

" Please -" Peter wailed it, in a raw, cutting way that Tony didn't even know he was capable of. " May !"

The sobbing interfered with the speech, then, overwhelming the words. From then on out there was nothing but fractions of coherence; choked-out syllables marooned between harsh, ragged breaths. If not for one of the nurses bodily shoving him out of the way, Tony would have stayed there, transfixed in horror, until it stopped.

It didn't stop.

"Holy shit," Tony managed. "Peter? What-"

He reached out, shaking Peter's shoulder, trying to get his attention. The nurse- Lauren, he remembered Lauren- glared at him.

"This is a night terror," she explained "He's fine, but he's not going to respond."

Peter writhed, twisting awkwardly over and away from contact, curling up into the fetal position. He seemed impossibly small, impossibly scared. There was a tone of terror in every heaving, hiccuping breath. Everything he saw inspired primal panic; signalling in sound and movement that somebody needed to make this stop.

And Tony couldn't do anything about it.

He was left to watch Lauren do next to nothing, with the sound of wailing ringing in his ears. This looked like every nightmare he'd had rolled into one consuming cacophony.

He wondered if it was worse because Peter was younger, because everything stung so much more sharply when you didn't have decades of life to compare it to, because nobody could sound like that in anything but absolute agony.

Peter found words again, for the fraction of a minute it took to scream for his mother. He scrubbed wildly at the skin across his once-broken collarbone, moved like he was trying to fight something off. He was going to do more damage—his body couldn't take such frantic activity. Tony wanted to plug his ears and run. It hurt too much to watch.

Tony, luckily, wasn't the one who moved to touch him. The nurse, Lauren, did that.

It was the same gesture , a gloved hand on his shoulder. Maybe as an attempt at comfort, maybe as an attempt at snapping him out of it- motive didn't matter, because Peter grabbed her hand.

The wailing reached a hoarse crescendo. Peter mangled a cry for help, his contorted face flushing red. And, with the unfettered force of the unconscious, he squeezed.

In the luls of sound where Peter had to inhale, Tony could hear the consequences. The crunching snap of bones and cartilage, then the sound of the fragments grinding together. Flesh bulged between Peter's fingers, bloating the glove out from the pressure. Red slits yawned open in the rubber fingertips. Blood bloomed beneath the rest, contained by the tightness at the wrist. A reddish slurry seeped from the places where the glove had failed, a fleshy, coppery tang joining the miasma of peppermint oil and rot in the air.

It clung, even with the controlled air flow attempting to purify the room.

Lauren reeled back, worsening the injury as she tried to pull her hand away. She took shaking breaths, her good hand fluttering on the call light, her lips pulling back into a grimace. To her credit, she didn't scream.

Tony had seen worse happen, objectively. More damage than that done. In New York, and Sokovia. Somehow, this was more disturbing.

"May" it was a high, panicked whine, as Peter's hands snapped back to his body. He sobbed so hard he gagged , then abruptly began clawing out the tube in his nose. "M- May - help …"

Tony stayed for ten more torturous minutes. There were ebbs in it, moments where screaming became crying became whimpering, and it seemed like it was almost over. But it always picked up again. Tony couldn't help but wonder if they'd be here, if he'd done better. There had to have been a point of failure; a point where he could have prevented this.

He tried to talk, to reassure, to do something . In response, Peter wrenched his body to the far side of the bed, twisting his leg as far as the brace would allow in the movement. The pattern of webbing glowed cheerfully as Peter tore out his IV, sending a gush of blood splattering across the sheets. Lauren's replacement insisted that he wouldn't bleed out, but they both knew it was just a matter of nobody being strong enough to restrain him.

Eventually, while he was staring at the dancing dots of blood on the bedspread, Tony felt something snap. It took him a few minutes- in which the wailing ebbed again- to do it, but he stood and opened the door. As he was turning he handle, he hear Peter's voice behind him- low, soft, more confused than anything now. Still underlined with anxiety; a still cry.

"Tony?"

Tony stepped outside. Closed the door behind him. Tried to make peace with the fact that Peter wasn't the only one in danger, anymore.

The soundproofing, he noted, was extremely effective.

He went to his workshop, because he needed the retreat. When he stepped inside— scrubbing a shaking hand through his hair, his heart still racing— he was met with the second teenager in his orbit. — Kamala, to use her given name— was waiting for him.

"Oh, christ," he muttered. "What do you want?"

She was standing with her feet together, her arms clasped behind her back, looking… anxious. Which meant bad news. It had been raining; water dripped from the tips of her hair, her chin, soaked the shoulders of her costume.

"They're gone," she said. "I-I went back and they're just gone ."

It took a moment for that to process, because his mind was still back with Peter, back in the hell of that white room.

She'd been back in Connecticut. He'd sent her back.

"Oh," it didn't seem important, anymore— an offshoot of a side project, really. It was baffling that she even cared . "How about… you go tell Rhodey. You like Rhodey, right? Go talk to him."

"Don't you care?" Kamala asked.

It seemed so frivolous, so childish; like a toddler crying over losing her doll in the middle of the Blitzkrieg.

"I care, I care, now is just not the time ," Tony said. "Could you just...go?"

There had to be a way out of this. A plan. Just, something he could do.

"I'm trying to help," Kamala said, quietly. "He's my friend too."

"Sweetheart, I know that you're trying," Tony snapped. "But you're failing. You- you probably tipped them off somehow. We- I expected little too much of you. We can talk about your bird guy. Just- not right now, okay?"

Kamala squared her shoulders. She was five feet, two inches of barely-restrained, critically misplaced fury, her mouth twitching into a snarl and her nose wrinkling in disgust. Tony groaned internally. He hated this part about working with kids— the tantrums. All that energy and passion, turned directly counter to productivity. Peter did it, some of the younger interns still did it, and now, Kamala was doing it.

"Who says I'm here because you want me to be?" She sounded all of five years old- I'm doing it because I want to, not because you told me to - and Tony had a difficult time listening to it. He didn't have time for whatever sweeping speech she planned to make. "Maybe- Maybe I have things to do outside of you people. Have you even considered that? That I- I don't just exist when you need me?"

"You're looking at this from the wrong angle," Tony said. He needed to get back to that paper, reorganise that data, help Peter get better— and Ms. Marvel was getting in the way of that. "We have been letting you work with us, okay? Not… whatever you're thinking."

"I'm trying to help!" her eyes were starting to well up with tears. "I'm- I've been trying to help for like six weeks, and-"

"Wait," Tony broke in. " six weeks ?"

God. the amount of progress they could have made in that time. The sheer volume of testing— the understanding they could have gotten if they'd had the chance to hit the ground running…

She'd kept them from that.

"...something like that?" Kamala said.

"What was happening?" Tony asked. A sick feeling built in the pit of his stomach— something like anger. "What were you hiding ?"

That stopped her. The energy drained from her body; rage bubbled over into shame as she realised what she had said.

"The… things on his wrists," She surrendered, because kids couldn't keep secrets, and this moment was a montage of this disadvantages of children.

"And you didn't tell me," Tony could feel the harshness of the words as they built in his throat, the cutting edge. At this point, she deserved it. "Both of you knew and neither of you told me. You little idiots. "

"He thought-"

"I don't care what he thought," Tony almost spat it. " You should have told us. This— this really doesn't reflect well on you, you know that?"

They could have stopped this. Caught it early, when it still made sense.

"I-" Kamala started, before cutting herself off, when she realised she had no argument.

Why had they ever trusted her?

Tony kept an eye on superhumans, kept up with the government, and her record was clean, but she was in high school . Of course she was going to fuck up.

"Just…go," he said. "Go talk to Rhodey, or Nat, I don't care. I have shit to do."

She inhaled sharply— the run-up to crying— and went.

* * *

AN: This probably won't update for a while, unfortunately. I'm dealing with some medical issues right now, and typing has gotten pretty painful. I'm working on dictating my writing, but that's slow as heck and google voice doesn't understand me too well. Because of that, I'm going to put this fic on semi-hiatus until I can reliably type this much again. Thank you for your understanding, readers3


	23. Chapter 23

Peter woke up sticky with sweat. Between the fever and the nightmares, it was a familiar feeling.

This morning, however, was different. It wouldn't be right to say he was feeling better, exactly, because he still felt like absolute shit, but things didn't seem quite as catastrophic as they had been. He could breathe now, at least.

When they'd figured out what was happening, the doctors had knocked him out, gone in with an endoscope, and cleaned out everything dead. He'd been talked through it; the lining of his sinuses had died off and peeled away, irritating the surrounding tissue enough to seal its opening shut. The most recent surgery had served to push the swelling back so his sinuses could drain better. He wasn't sure how it'd been done, exactly. At that point, he'd been too repulsed to keep on listening.

He slowly sat up, trying to acclimatize to the new form of discomfort the morning had brought. His entire body itched like all hell, and when he looked, he found scratches running up and down the length of his arms, like he'd been clawing at them as he slept. In places he had broken the skin, revealing wet, pink dermis. He was incredibly tempted to pick at the ragged edges of the little wounds.

If the door hadn't opened, he wasn't sure what he would've done. He was caught with his fingertips suspended over the worst of the scuffing by a man he didn't recognize.

The new nurse—the uniform was the same—had harsh, hawkish features, red hair. His cold grey eyes were reminiscent of a predator, and set off the same response- Peter could feel his heart rate pick up.

The intense smell of essential oils was beginning to fade, at least.

"Who are you?" Peter let his hand fall. He was still so tired . The exhaustion was clear as such, now- before, he'd just felt absently adrift, slightly disconnected from his body. Today, everything had been thrown into sharp relief.

"I'm Daniel." There was an artificial softness to the man's voice. He was overcompensating. "Lauren won't be taking care of you anymore."

It felt like the loss of a friend. Peter had liked Lauren. The frown that crept onto his face was entirely involuntary.

"Why?" His fingers crept back into place. Speaking was still frustratingly painful.

Daniel was suddenly too close, close enough for the bubbles of their body temperatures to overlap. The clammy proximity of normal skin.

"Nobody told you?" Daniel's hands, bigger than Lauren's, rougher-skinned, manipulated Peter's arm to allow a better view of the damage he'd done. "She's… taking some time off."

He remembered waking, that night, in tangle of sweaty blankets, dimly aware that he'd torn his stupid feeding tube out. Night terrors, like he'd had when he was little, had after his uncle died. A stress-induced parasomnia.

The realisation came like a slap.

There had been blood. Dotted across the sheets; smudged on his skin. And for once, it hadn't been his.

They were hiding things, and he knew what that indicated. Now that he was aware enough to pick up on the deception… how much of that had they already done?

The thought chased him through the routine motion of the vitals check.

"Is Lauren..." Peter chose his words carefully, chewed the skin of his few exposed fingertips. A nauseous anxiety built behind his ribs. "How bad did I hurt her? Will she be—is she going to come back?"

"She's fine," Daniel said. Then, with a stupid-sounding amount of optimism- "You'll probably leave before she's back, though. It might be a month or so."

Peter was left with a sinking heart and the sting of that mystery. He flopped back- too fast, hurting his stitches- and looked across the milk-white expanse of his pillow.

Would they sedate him, if he asked?

If he was hurting people- not just himself, but… civilians wasn't the right term, but they hadn't signed up to this - he needed to be somehow not there. His presence was an active risk to everyone around him, and that needed to be fixed. Lauren, at least, was coming back. The next person might not be so lucky.

He didn't get much respite before the next knock. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes of trying to process, and luxuriating in being able to think clearly.

When the door opened, the woman who stepped through was completely unfamiliar. She was maybe May's age, and had curly blonde hair pulled tightly back from her face. The surgical mask she wore was, unlike the others, light pink.

The masks were bothering him, he realised. Not being able to see people's expressions. Not being able to tell if they were afraid.

"Morning, sweetheart," the woman said. She sounded almost cheerful, in the same false way that TV presenters were, trying to assure comfort more than actually expressing anything. "I'm Emily. I'm your new wound care nurse."

There had been a predecessor. A darker-haired woman who seemed to live exclusively in the gaps in his memory.

How much was he missing?

"What are you gonna, like, actually do ?" Peter asked. Maybe it would be something he wouldn't have to endure immediately. Sometimes, he was lucky enough that procedures could be put off.

"Well," Emily said, pulling a little silver cart of equipment through the door behind her, "I'm here to help with your hands. Do you know what 'debridement' is? "

Peter wasn't sure how comfortable he was with that. It sounded like close, close contact, and a horrible awareness of how breakable other people were. For the first few months after getting his powers, he'd had to avoid touching things- people, drywall, glass- and this was a similar feeling.

He shook his head.

"Debridement is when you clean the dead skin away from wounds, so they can heal better." Emily explained. "In your case, that means your hands."

Peter wrinkled his nose in disgust.

"How are you with needles?" Emily asked. "This would hurt a lot without local anesthetics, so there's going to be needles." when Peter looked unsure, she continued. "If you want me to turn the TV on, or if you want to hold your teddy, you can."

Peter shrugged, tucking his as-yet-unnamed bear— probably would have wanted him to name it—into the crook of his arm and surrendering his free hand. He could feel his heartbeat, thrumming against his ribs like hummingbird wings. It wasn't normal—nothing really scared him like this, outside of the battlefield.

"Needles are fine." he said.

It wasn't as bad as it sounded. The first few steps were only uncomfortable because of contact, as gentle as she made it. Emily's gloved hands carefully manipulated Peter's, so his palms were facing upwards, and she smoothly removed the dressings.

He tried not to focus on his hands.

They didn't look like part of his body anymore. Everything upwards of the joints of his wrist was almost alien. There were splotches of yellow, white, gray, awash in a sticky sea of bloodless pink, the color that cotton went when washed with red.

His wrists had gotten bad first. Now, most of the damage was concentrated in the raw reddish islands of his palms, with a few offshoots crawling up his fingers. The live skin of his thumbs, and his few undamaged fingers, formed a ring around the yawning wounds, blanching white at the edges, like it was waterlogged.

Emily uncapped a syringe, warned of a sharp pinch, and prodded it into the skin underneath his thumb.

"Can you tell me what you're doing?" he asked. "People never explain anything here."

"Sure," Emily answered. She began to pick up instruments from her trolley, showing each one in turn. Surgical scissors, a scalpel, antiseptic wipes.

The actual process of debridement wasn't anywhere near as disturbing as it should've been, violent as it looked. Peter was entirely calm as Emily dug at his skin with her scalpel and scissors, and when she worked little pieces of grey-white skin free, the resultant sensation was an incredibly pleasant one. It brought a rush of relaxation, as if the bones in his hand were clicking back into place.

It didn't become a bad experience until it started to end.

When Emily started wiping down her instruments and putting things in the sharps bin, he frowned.

"Are you done?" he asked. He picked at the newly expanded edges of his wound with his fingers. It itched. If he put enough pressure against the edge, he could have peeled back more. "It doesn't feel like you're done?"

His hands didn't feel clean. It seemed like there was more contaminant left, and he was suddenly overcome with the urge to get rid of it.

Emily looked concerned.

"That's all I needed to do," she explained. "I know your hands are still numb, but pretty soon it's going to start hurting, and it'd be a lot worse if I took off more skin."

Peter surrendered to that, because he was starting to feel the claustrophobia of having someone else there. He was quiet while she reapplied the dressings, despite how uncomfortable it was to feel her hands brushing across his numb skin. Underneath the bandages, he was hyper aware of the places where she'd stopped. The sensation was akin to itching; the desire to pick at a scab.

Emily, thankfully, didn't try to make more conversation. She just packed up and left him in peace.

He tried reading, after that, on his tablet, but he couldn't focus—he was too distracted by the constant, consuming urge to interfere with the edges of his wounds. That would be impossible—he was being much too closely watched. There weren't so many checks now—before, it had been every two hours, blood draws every day—but there was still far too much attention to get away with anything.

Attention, and alarms. Alarms on everything he was hooked up to, the bed alarm that had to be disabled every time they moved him out of it.

He needed to get away from those. Away from all of this. He needed to be somewhere where he couldn't hurt people, where he could submit entirely to himself.

On the IV stand beside his bed, there were a stack of infusion pumps. Plastic things; boxy and grey, with dark little screens lit up by red numerals, like the screen of a digital alarm clock. Each had its own set of buttons, some slightly worn by use. They were connected to almost everything that was in his body, tying him down.

And each had a logo.

Which he could look up.


	24. Chapter 24

Kamala was not scared.

It was a bright, sunny Saturday, and across the river, the skyline of New York shimmered in the spring smog. By virtue of proximity, Kamala was one of the people who'd been pulled up to keep an eye on Spider-Man's abandoned turf. Just for a couple hours, in her case- apparently, Daredevil had a lunch date. And she was very steadfastly avoiding being intimidated by the job.

"Well…" she leaned against Lockjaw, who'd finally returned from his getaway with the neighbours' caucasian shepherd dog, and scooted her satchel further up on her shoulder. Ammi had insisted she bring Spider-Man's mom a massive tupperware container of biryani, and it was throwing off her balance. "Here goes nothing."

Teleporting in with a giant dog was always a fantastic show of power, but New York was New York, and New York didn't really care. At most, she ended up on a few people's snapchat stories before fading into the cityscape, and that she was kind of glad for.

She'd been an active enough part of the r/spideywatch community to know his average patrol route almost by heart, and that made it easy.

That gave her time to think.

'Concern' wasn't the right word, really. Neither was _worry_. The thick, harsh thing hissing in her chest was more akin to guilt.

Her eyes skimmed the ground on autopilot.

She should have told someone. Iron Man had been right

Kamala helped a lost little girl find her mother. She had been doing this long enough that she barely had to be mentally present. The handiwork was almost exactly the same- the only difference between superhero-ing in NYC and superhero-ing Jersey City was what side the river was on.

That, and the questions.

Lots of _do you know what happened to him_ and _I liked Spider-Man better_ and,from a little boy in a bright blue Captain America shirt- _when will he be back?_

The worst part was not having answers. Not having an explanation for any of it. It felt almost like remembrance, on a massive scale.

She was rounding off his route- approaching the new, Stark-Funded NYU campus- when she saw a familiar face. Dropped to the ground, walked past to get a closer look.

Dark curls, pulled back in a blue scrunchie; books clutched to her chest, talking to some other slightly-older college student- laughing. Smiling. Being a normal human being, with a normal human life. Recognisable by those vivid blue eyes. The little circular scar- the size of a thumbprint- above her eyebrow.

All at once, the pieces fell into place.

Sammy.

Maybe the vulture, definitely related. Her well-muscled shoulders might just have filled out that suit. A young woman with the right technology could reasonably cover her voice and her tracks…

But she couldn't stalk her. Not right now. Not physically, into class. It would be more pragmatic to skim through student records later, looking for a _Samantha_ ; add that to her collated information.

And besides, she had a clunky cooler box of biryani to offload.

The address wasn't given to her- rather, it was dictated to her by her phone,in the slightly grating synthesized voice of her free navigation app.

It lead her to an utterly underwhelming apartment building, where a familiar woman was lifting a backpack into the backseat of a boxy, early-2000s model car. Her auburn hair was loose, this time, blowing in the sticky breeze. As Kamala approached, she turned-

"I know you." She said.

"Yeah, we…" Kamala had absolutely no script for this situation. "Met? I- my mom made you this."

She dug through her satchel and presented the tupperware container.

The woman- she'd never actually gotten her name- smiled.

"Well, tell her thanks." She said. "I don't think we were ever actually introduced? I'm May."

"I'm ," Kamala said. "Wait, you know that," She scrambled for a distraction, and settled on the bag- "Are you going somewhere?"

"Upstate, actually." May said, tucking the biryani under her arm. The smile faded. Shit. "Spider-man… isn't doing so well."

One bag. She wasn't expecting a very long stay.

"Oh." Kamala felt like she was eighty percent sheer awkwardness by volume. Like she'd gone past foot-in-mouth to a horrid meeting of knee and epiglottis. "If you're, uh, if you want to get there super fast, I have a teleporting dog?"

May raised an eyebrow. Kamala took the opportunity to cup her hands and yell for Lockjaw, who dutifully popped into existence beside her, tongue out and panting in excitement.

"Huh." May said, profoundly unimpressed. "Okay, just let me put this in my bag."

She stowed the biryani and looked up at the dog, unflappably casual.

"So, how does this work?" she asked.

"You, uh, touch the dog," Kamala said, and ruffled the fur on the back of his neck.

"Lockjaw, this is May," Kamala introduced them. "Can you take us to the Avengers' compound?"

Lockjaw barked in affirmation.

May gave the dog another look, shrugged, and reached out.

They jumped.

* * *

May took to teleportation surprisingly well- she startled as they found themselves abruptly at the compound, standing on the green. But quickly she recovered herself, and smiled at Kamala.

"Do you want to come say hi?"

Kamala felt like she was being conscripted, a little bit, but she hadn't even talked to Spider-Man in days, and the fact that saying hi was still an option was very reassuring.

She nodded, and followed the older woman through a maze of entry procedures- swishing through doors after May with her key-card, gowning and gloving and tying her hair back with the provided plain black hair-tie. She could smell it from the anteroom- something different than the normal too-clean chemical scent of hospital and controlled airflow. Something more organic.

The room was dim in comparison- Kamala's eyes adjusted as the interior door hissed shut behind them, and she saw Spider-Man.

Yet again, he looked worse.

He was all but swallowed by a heap of pillows, his head lolled back. Blue headphones peeked out from his messy hair, almost lost in the tangles. Between them, thin blue veins spiderwebbed up his face and across his closed eyelids, looking fluorescent against the unnatural pale of his skin.

At first, despite the faint hiss of music through the headphones, Kamala thought he was sleeping. He was utterly devoid of energy, even missing the twitchy nervousness she normally saw breaking through the lethargy.

"Hi," May said, and he flickered to life, like an old fluorescent light coming on. Blinked at them with tired eyes, and reached out to May, who shuffled close enough to be cuddled, for him to slump bonelessly against her and rest his head on her shoulder. She held him close, like a little kid, and Kamala had no doubt that her own mother would have done the same.

"May…" his voice was still strained, and it took an awkward few seconds before his gaze flitted to her. That vacant, zonked-out look was gone, replaced with a slight, subtle anxiousness. "Oh."

They were breaking the one-person rule, she realised.

Did he know? That she'd effectively ratted him out?

"Hello-" Kamala waved, then bit back more chatter, feeling incredibly out of place. Most of it was him- there was no evidence of his usual shaky smile, that practiced demeanor that allowed people to be unaware of their own intrusion.

He didn't seem willing to make eye contact with either of them- his focus was on his hands, idly tugging at stray bits of fluff on his wool blanket. More of his fingers were bandaged; somewhere along the way he'd lost more nails.

"How's your giant dog?"

No eye contact. That slight uncomfortable edge to each word, the absurd amount of effort that seemed to go into each syllable. But May was looking at her with an expectant sort of hope.

"Lockjaw? He's doing great." Kamala said, and fell into a rhythm, sparing him the effort of speaking. Her giant magic dog was awesome as always; Spider-Man would have to meet him when he was better, out of here. Jersey City was-as he'd put it- weird, and relatively uninteresting.

She had just gotten to Queens- and her biryani run- when he snapped.

It seemed to happen all at once.

" _Please_ ," he cut in. Pain flashed across his face, and Kamala recognised the start of a breakdown. "Could you please just- _stop talking_? You're making this so much worse."

He closed his eyes again, forcefully squeezing them shut. Clung closer to his mom.

Kamala shut up immediately. She felt as though her chest was caving in, like all the air had left her lungs at once.

She was struck by how _different_ he was; from the image of him she remembered from before they'd met, and even from three or four weeks ago.

"I'm sorry." She said, her mouth dry. It felt hollow and entirely inadequate. "I'm. I'll leave."

She marched out to faint protest, tore off her gloves and gown, and spent a few minutes lost in the process of fleeing the building.

Lockjaw was waiting outside.

Kamala collapsed against the warm bulk of his body.

"This _sucks_." She mumbled, into his fur. " _I_ suck."

Lockjaw responded with a supportive _boof,_ and took her home.

* * *

Kamala got home, stomped upstairs, and began digging through her closet for her prayer mat.

Maybe she was overstepping some great spiritual boundary, but she didn't really care. She clearly couldn't help close-up anymore. But she could at least do this.

She unrolled her mat, and it was a little strange, to do this in the stuffy atmosphere of her room, with the smell of old coffee and abandoned fruit loops drifting from her desk, but that didn't matter. It wasn't like she prayed with her family all that often anyway- this was no less improper.

When she was prepared, Kamala stood straight at the end of her mat, and took a deep breath. Tried to clear her mind, as she was meant to.

" _Saleh rickaten beerajaat shafah Spider-Man,"_ she began. " _Bismilah arahman araheim."_

She leant into the steady rhythm, the poetry of it. Allowed herself something almost like awe, if it hadn't been this mundane. What she felt now was more familiar, like the absolute power of a parent when you were very small.

" _Homdoo-ala rabee-alamein, arahman Araheim. malik-ayoomedeem, ayakanaboodo ayaka-es-tie-een."_

Even in praying in private, there was unity, knowing how many voices had shared her words.

" _Eh-de-ne serasa moostakein. Serat ela thena an amta alayhoom ghara maghdoobe ahlayhoom Walla thaleen."_

The motion of each rakat was familiar, too, and helped to underscore her Arabic- it was a meditative process. It brought _hope_.

After her second rakat, kneeling with her feet tucked beneath her, her hands resting on her knees, she recited a closing verse, and then, at the end, turned to face right.

" _Assalamu alaikum warahmatullah_."

She turned to face left.

" _Assalamu alaikum warahmatullah."_

She rocked smoothly back into a sitting position, much better prepared to meet the world.


End file.
